Fantastika – Page 79 – Wis[s]e Words

It’s Hugo time again

Published on April 29, 2011

Earlier this week the Hugo Award nominations were announced and the category I’m primarily interested in, Best Novel, is okay but not great:

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Interestingly enough four out of the five nominees are women, something that hasn’t happened too often. So far I’ve only read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but have both Cryoburn and The Dervish House on the to-read pile. Was I forced to vote, I’d go for the Jemisin (one of the best books I read last year and a very strong first novel, followed by the McDonald and the Bujold — but knowing how much the Hugo voters like Willis, she seems a safe bet to win this category.

It being Hugo Award time again, of course it’s also time for the semi-annual Hugo Award bitchfest, as online fandom once again berate the voters for being out of touch and exclusive. This time there has been a small storm brewing over the fan categories:

But don’t even get me started on the Best Fanzine and Best Fan Writer awards. Maybe I’m exposing my ignorance here, but beyond StarShipSofa, I haven’t heard of a damn one, nor am I familiar with any of the writers. My beef, obviously, is the lack of presence of blogs, bloggers and online writers. Where’re the Nialls (Harrison and Alexander)? Where’s Abigail Nussbaum or Adam Whitehead? No nod for SF Signal? Really?

James Nicoll, nominated for the second year in a row for best fanwriter (congrats!) was quick to put Aidan Moher right: “Apparently the net is large enough for us not to have run into each other in the 25 years I’ve been online + however long you’ve been online“… Most of the nominees Aidan complained about were online and had been online for years, if they hadn’t always been online — that he didn’t know them was an indication of how big online fandom has become.

Setting that aside, there remains the more general complaint about the out of touchness of the Hugo voters, as echoed in comments by Jonathan M: Hugo voters tend to be older and not too involved in online fandom and generally are conservative in their choices, much of which I agree with.

The problem with the Hugo Awards is that they were established in a time when science fiction and fantasy were much smaller and the fan commmunities build around them even smaller, a time when it was probably possible to know every active fan in the world. They got their prominence when it was still possible to read every word of science fiction published in English in a given year and when it was true that the Hugo voters were the sf and fantasy community.

This hasn’t been true for decades now, but the Hugos, as the oldest still existing awards in the genre, retain their standing even when the community that votes on them has become less and less representative of fandom as a whole, if you can still even speak of fandom this way. You can be an active, happy and well connected fan and never ever know about worldcons, Hugos, fanzines and old skool fandom at all, just like many Hugo voters happily putter around the same small world of their fandom.

All of which doesn’t really matter if not for the fact that the Hugos are the most important award in science fiction and fantasy still — if they’re out of touch and conservative, they’re worthless. I’m not certain this point has been reached already and certainly in the fan categories there has been somewhat of a renaissance the last few years — James Nicoll may be know in traditional fandom, but his fanac is as untraditional as you can get. Being ignorant of the nominees does not necessarily mean the awards are at fault; as said fandom is big enough that this will quite often be the case.

If people do want to reform the Hugos they need to put money where their mouth is and buy a supporting membership of this year’s Worldcon to get involved. At fifty dollars (about .5 euros in real money) this is a significant barrier to entry in these economic depressed times, I agree, but it’s the only way to change them as the organisation behind the awards, the World Science Fiction Society can only change the awards if their members want it. Online kvetching won’t change that.

The Gollancz fifty

Published on April 22, 20111 Comment

This year it will be fifty years since Gollancz started publishing science fiction and fantasy. To celebrate the publisher set up a website listing its fifty best science fiction and fantasy novels (or at least the ones it still has the rights to) and is asking us, their readers to chose our favourites out of these. Twentyfive science fiction and twentyfive fantasy novels are listed and you get to choose one of each. The top five choices will be published in a special “collectable retro-look edition”. A nice idea to celebrate a very important British science fiction and fantasy publisher. I can’t be the only fan who quickly learned to associate yellow covers in the library’s bookcases with proper science fiction….

Given that these lists had to be created out of the books Gollancz still had the rights to, they’re somewhat biased towards contemporary authors, but unfortunatly also heavily biased towards male authors: of the twentyfive science fiction novels, only two are by women. The fantasy list is slightly more balanced, but still only has five novels written by women. Both lists are also very white and anglosaxon. Of course you can argue that given the constraints of having to work from their own backlist meant that these lists would always be imbalanced, but than that only moves the argument to why Gollancz hasn’t had a more diverse publishing list in these fifty years…

Apart from that, these lists are a good excuse to play the usual “bold if you’ve read it, italicise if you own it” game. First the science fiction list, which seems to be the stronger of the two and from which I’ve certainly read the most. On the downside, there are no real surprises in this list either: a mix of obvious classics always present in these lists and contemporary bestselling authors. Many of these books have had special editions recently as well, e.g. in the Science Fiction Masterworks series. Which probably explains why I read so many of them…

A Case of Conscience by James Blish
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Dune by Frank Herbert
Fairyland by Paul McAuley
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Flood by Stephen Baxter
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Gateway by Frederik Pohl
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Pavane by Keith Roberts
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Ringworld by Larry Niven
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The Separation by Christopher Priest
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

The fantasy list seems to be more heavily biased towards contemporary books, with some odd choices: the complete Book of the New Sun but Stephen R. Donaldson is represented by the first book of the third trilogy in the Thomas Covenant series? Why Eric of all Discworld novels?

Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
Book of the New Sun (Vol 1&2) (Vol 3&4) by Gene Wolfe
The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg
Conan Volume One by Robert E. Howard
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
Elric by Michael Moorcock
Eric by Terry Pratchett
Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin
The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Little, Big by John Crowley
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Memoirs of a Master Forger by William Heaney
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
The Runes of the Earth by Stephen Donaldson
Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance
Viriconium by M. John Harrison
Wolfsangel by M. D. Lachlan

I’m not sure which books of either list I’d choose as my favourite, but I’d think in the end I’d go for Stand on Zanzibar and Mythago Wood, both books by British writers who died too soon and who deserve a bit more attention.

The Female Man — Joanna Russ

Published on April 3, 2011

Cover of The Female Man

The Female Man
Joanna Russ
214 pages
published in 1975

The Female Man is the third book in my list of works by female sf authors I’ve set myself as a challenge to read this year. Of the books on the list it is the most explicitely feminist one, a cri de coeur of “second wave feminism”, a science fictional equivalent of The Feminine Mystique. Written in 1970 but only published five years later it was somewhat controversial, science fiction never having been the most enlightened genre in the first place. Reading it some thirtyfive years later it’s tempting to view it as just a historical artifact, its anger safely muted as “we know better now” and accept the equality of men and women matter of factly, its message spent as sexism is no longer an issue, with history having moved on from the bad old days in which The Female Man was written.

Bollocks of course, but seductive bollocks. The reality is that for all the progress made since The Female Man was published, its anger is not quite obsolete yet, or we wouldn’t have had the current debate about the lack of female science fiction writers in the first place. What’s more, The Female Man ill fits in this anodyne, whiggish view of history anyway. Russ is much more angry than that. She’s utterly scathing in her view of men in this novel, reducing them to one dimensional bit players: thick, macho assholes her much more intelligent heroines have to cope with. You might think this “hysterical”, “shrill”, “a not very appealing aggressiveness” but Russ is ahead of you and has included this criticism in her novel already, on page 141: “we would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them.” Russ was too smart not to understand that no matter how non-threatening and “rational” The Female Man might have been written, (male) critics would still call it emotional and not worth engaging. But Russ uses her anger as a weapon and tempers it with humour and some of the angriest, bitterest scenes are also grimly witty.

Reading David Weber on my mobile phone

Published on March 20, 2011

Cover of Ashes of Victory

Ashes of Victory & War of Honor
David Weber
Kindle editions
published in 2000 and 2002

Bear with me because this is relevant. This January, about a year or so after everybody else, I finally broke down and got myself a smart phone on a not too onerous subscription plan. The phone I got was a HTC Wildfire, a dear little thing with some annoyances, but nothing major and because it was an Android phone, it had a version of Amazon’s Kindle available for it. Earlier this month I got this, then was looking around for some free books to put on it. Got the usual set of the Classics from Project Gutenberg of course, but I also wanted something more modern, something light and preferably science fiction, something I could read on the tram without having to pay too much attention to it.

Enter David Weber and his Honor Harrington series. Back in the nineties I devoured those books, but even then I knew they were not by any measure good books: wish fulfillment war porn with a severe case of hero worship and occasional dodgy politics and more than occasional dodgy science. Even on a sentence and paragraph level Weber is often just not very good: awkward dialogue, oodles of infodumps just as the spacewars heat up and in general too much verbiage with stock phrases repeated over and over again. Yet for all that I kept reading. I was going to just read a bit of Ashes of Victory just to test Kindle on my phone, yet here I am having read both that and War of Honor. Weber must be doing something right.

Light linkblogging

Published on March 10, 20113 Comments

Learning to Read Adam Roberts and On Learning to Read Adam Roberts
How do you solve a problem like Adam Roberts, a writer every book of which I’ve read I’ve disagreed with and/or disliked? Whom, despite this, I still keep coming back to every few years or so. Bad writers you can dismiss, writers that you dislike you can dismiss, even writers you like and enjoy you can often set aside more easily than a writer that irritates you, like a piece of sand in an oyster.

Vuijlsteke brainstorms the right colours to use in a health check for some server or something
For now he’s settling on a scheme with five colours between dark green and dark red. Myself, I’ve more and more realised anything but three colours (safe, unknown/undecided and danger Will Robinson danger) is overkill and confusing especially to higher management. Really high management (or “overhead”) only needs two: “need to deal with this to be finally rid of this project” and “let the little people worry about this when we’re gone”.

Remember when Iron Maiden got a number one hit?
The discussion is a bit unfair on “Bring your Daughter …to the Slaughter” which is a better live than single track but interesting in seeing people’s opinions about who’s actually listening to metal. The consensus seem to confirm my own hunch that it was both the boys you wouldn’t trust in woodshop with a sharp knife and the more nerdy dreaming types with Tolkien posters and D&D habits as well as people like, well, Ben.

Somebody else fed up with the Holland Uber Alles message of much current advertising
Not to mention in current politics cultural commentary, popular culture… Holland is a decent enough country to live in, if it were not for a large part of the people living in it and their absymal tastes in everything. Dutch culture does not have to be inferior to anywhere else, but by and large we’ve mostly seem to haven given up competing with the big boys and retreated to celebrating our own mediocrity. As long as it drapes itself in orange and clogs and windmills any old shit can sell as shinola.

The Comics Journal has been redesigned and under new management
It keeps its worst aspect though: having to register to be able to comment. I hate sites that do that, especially when if you really feel the need to filter your readers, use OpenID and let people register with e.g. their Livejournal accounts rather than setting up your own crappy registring process. Tor.com does this as well and my comments nine out of ten times still get eaten. Doesn’t endear me to the fsckers.