Fantastika – Page 82 – Wis[s]e Words

Oy! Paul di Filippo! S.O.D. got a message for you!

Published on January 26, 2011

Hey, di Filippo, if you’re really so worried about the number of people on this planet:

Did you ever feel that all the world’s problems–environmental, cultural, political–could be the result of just too many fucking people on the planet? (“Fucking,” as used here, is a precisely descriptive adjective, and not a mere kneejerk intensifier.) Nobody wants to talk about this issue, since it’s too fraught with ethical conundrums: First World versus Third World, Elites versus Marching Morons, People of Color versus People of Pallor, Age versus Youth, Healthy versus Sick, Coercion versus Choice. What a minefield! And, yes, I know the “good news” about how the rate of population growth has leveled off, leaving us with a projection of “only” nine billion souls for mid-century, and even a hollowing out of certain countries like Russia, Japan and Italy. But I still say the current population level is at the root of most of our troubles.

S.O.D. has the solution for you:

You first.

On a more general note, I agree with Lenny when he notes that overpopulation angst looks suspiciously loe bog standard capitalist propaganda about useless people, scroungers, dole scum, only on a global scale. The idea that our problems are unsolvable because there are too many people fecklessly breeding and hence natural resources are running out, is very convenient for those who have hogged the greater share of our world’s riches, while it lets the rest of us off the hook as well. No point in trying to change the world if everything you’re going to do is going to be swamped by the endless hordes of poor brown people. If there are too many people in the world and no matter how you divide its wealth the majority of people will remain poor and miserable, that means I don’t have too feel guilty about my own comfortable middle class lifestyle, or bother my betters about the far greater wealth they have amassed. It’s the sort of propaganda that does well with well meaning liberals and leftists, intelligent enough to see how difficult it is to change the system, but not intelligent enough to see through the fallacies of the overpopulation myth. It’s been that way ever since Malthus and sadly, science fiction has often been at the forefront of this propaganda effort, from “The Marching Morons” to Ideocracy.

Other people’s new year’s resolutions

Published on January 23, 20111 Comment

Like me, another science fiction reader/blogger called Martin (Lewis in his case) found out he read shockingly little science fiction by women and decided to do something about it:

Over Christmas I decided to do something about this: I would read and review one SF novel by a women every month in 2011. I appreciate this sounds pathetically modest but in the context of my current reading I’m afraid it isn’t. There were several SF novels by women already languishing on my shelves, bought but unread and in this state for some time. I rescued these and then topped them up from Amazon. This in itself was an eye-opener; almost all the books I searched for – even those which had only recently been published – were out of print.

He’s not the only one to set himself this challenge: so did Ian Sales:

Torque Control’s Women in SF Week has inspired me to read twelve science fiction novels by women writers during 2011 as my reading challenge. I’ve tentatively identified the dozen novels I’m going to read. I didn’t want to pick only those published since 2001, although many are from the last decade. Nor would I limit myself to books published in the UK. But I did want my list to be comprise only authors I’ve not read before (bar one or two slight cheats).

And, neatly satisfying the law of threes, over at Torque Control, Vector‘s new editor Shana Worthen will be holding a monthly bookgroup reading through the winners of last year’s poll of best sf novels by women published from 2001-2010.

For myself I had already decided last year I needed to read more female science fiction, spending the last months of year reading and rereading some writers I had neglected for too, like Lois McMaster Bujold, C. J. Cherryh and Mary Gentle. But perhaps I should try and set myself the same sort of goal as Ian and Martin as well, even if what I read is so depend on my mood and interests on any given day. So let’s pick a list of twelve books I can and should read this year, either science fiction or fantasy, all written by women:

January: The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula LeGuin (start with a classic, especially when it’s a short one…)
February: Bold as Love — Gwyneth Jones
March: The Female Man — Joanna Russ
April: China Mountain Zhang — Maureen McHugh
May: Foreigner — C. J. Cherryh
June: The Halfling and Other Stories — Leigh Brackett
July: A Point of Honor — Dorothy J. Heydt
August: Golden Witchbreed — Mary Gentle
September: 10,000 Light Years from Home — James Tiptree, Jr
October: Trouble and Her Friends — Melissa Scott
November: No Present Like Time — Steph Swainston
December: The King’s Peace — Jo Walton

These are on my shelves right now, all save three not read before and selected to have a relatively wide selection of science fiction/fantasy. These (hopefully) won’t be the only female written sf/fantasy books I read this year, but these are the ones I will read.

Amongst Others

Published on January 19, 2011

cover of Among Others

When you have Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

I am not Welsh or female, I do not walk with a cane, and I do not have a dead sibling or a parent who wants me dead. I never attended a boarding school, my family is far-flung and American, and I have never (to the best of my knowledge) conversed with fairies. And yet to a startling extent Among Others feels like a book about the experience of being me when I was, like Mori, fifteen. This turns out to be a fairly common reaction to reading Walton’s novel, at least among the kind of people I tend to know. It is quite possibly the best thing I have ever read about the way people of our ilk, when young, use books and reading to—in the words of Robert Charles Wilson—“light the way out of a difficult childhood.”

Locus reviewer Gary K. Wolfe:

I don’t believe I’ve seen, either in fiction or in memoir, as brilliant and tone-perfect an account of what discovering SF and fantasy can mean to its young readers – citing chapter and verse of actual titles – as in Jo Walton’s remarkable and somewhat autobiographical new novel Among Others.

As Cory Doctorow:

This is one of the places where Walton does something that made my head spin. For though Morwenna’s life has much that makes her unhappy, from her family to her pariah status to her gamey leg, these books are not an escape for her. She dives into them, certainly, and goes away from the world, but she find in them a whole cognitive and philosophical toolkit for unpicking the world, making sense of its inexplicable moving parts, from people to institutions. This isn’t escapism, it’s discovery.

Rave about the same book and with largely the same comments, you pay attention. Not that I needed introduction to Jo Walton, having know her as a fellow fan on Usenet since the mid-nineties and as an excellent science fiction and fantasy writer since her first published novel, The King’s Peace, but such high praise from such distinguished reviewers does concentrate the mind. Amongst Others might just be Jo’s breakthrough book, the novel that moves her from a cult author into a proper success, finally. She has been upping the stakes with every new book: from her start with her three book Histoire à clef series fo Arthurian fantasy, to her reworking of Anthony Trollope with dragons in Tooth and Claw, to one of the most chilling alternate histories in the Small Change series. In each case I had expected her to achieve the same sort of success as somebody like Alastair Reynolds had gotten, but for some reason it never quite happened. Even those alternate history novels, which I had thought would’ve been a surefire hit, well, didn’t quite make it:

Well, actually, Half a Crown is arguably an example of the system not working as well as it might. Farthing did okay midlist numbers in hardcover and actually better-than-expected numbers in mass-market paperback. But for reasons best described as “weather” (i.e., nothing whatsoever to do with the book), Ha’penny took a dip in hardcover–fewer library sales, among other things, if I recall correctly–and the mass-market paperback fell off a cliff. This is why Half a Crown hasn’t had a softcover edition yet–since we were clearly doing something wrong, I didn’t want to spray-paint further lousy numbers onto Jo’s track record.

You do wonder why a great writer like Jo hasn’t been able to catch a break yet — insufficient promotion perhaps, though I’m not sure how much that still matters in this interweb age, or perhaps it’s because she switched genres too much, or not writing in the right subgenre, not writing widescreen space opera or, as Patrick says, it’s just the weather? Good writers can and do bubble under, write books that everybody who finds them loves, but which never quite find their audience. Science fiction is littered with examples (William Barton, T. J. Bass to name but two examples from my own shelves); it would be a shame if the same happened to Jo.

Especially since Among Others does sound incredibly interesting, ever since Jo told of how she grew up in a post-industrial landscape on her Livejournal and people started to tell her to turn it into a novel. She has managed to turn her own experiences discovering science fiction and growing up with it in a world where nobody else cared for it into a proper fantasy novel and while with any other writer I would be wary, Jo has been writing about this online for a long time, ever since we both were regulars on rec.arts.sf.written. She still does so at Tor.com, talking about all her favourite books and what they meant to her and why they’re so good and you should read them — she’s probably the one person who has done the most to nudge me towards books I would not have read otherwise, after S.

Which is why I put my order in for the hardcover at the local science fiction bookstore, which had already sold out of the two copies they had apparantly recieved in November. Eight days I got to wait now, oy.

Second Variety

Published on January 16, 2011

Philip K. Dick lives! As Beamjockey explains, this is the second robotic head of Philip K. Dick, the first having been lost in transit back in 2005. Hanson Robotis now has rebuild the head, stronger, better, faster and what’s more, this was supposedly done with support from Dutch broadcaster VPRO. This doesn’t surprise me; the VPRO is the kind of broadcaster that suits Dick very much, somewhat on the experimental side with not every experiment being a success.

It’s not called the Third Wave for nothing

Published on January 10, 20111 Comment

I missed this back in late November, but apparantly a minor blogstorm erupted when Cosma Shalizi posted his “semi-crank pet notion” that the singularity had already happened

The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918.

Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.

Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.

Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.

Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.

Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters”? Check; we call them “the self-regulating market system” and “modern bureaucracies” (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.

An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. (“Drive” is the best I can do; words like “agenda” or “purpose” are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)

And two months later I end up wondering why, because this is hardly controversial or new. If the dirty little secret of science fiction is cribbing from history, than cyberpunk’s dirty little secret is how much it ripped off the ideas of futurologist Alvin Toffler. The Third Wave was cyberpunk’s bible aqnd you can see a direct line from it to Gibson’sNeuromancer or Sterling’s Schismatrix as these authors embraced its vison of a future of relentless change, where the old political and economical schemas were worthless and new economies and ways of living needed to be invented. The world was going to be transformed, but Toffler never pretended this was anything new.

It was after all the Third Wave, not the First Wave. That had been the invention of agriculture and its subsequent spread over the world, not yet completed when the second wave happened, the industrial revolution, also not yet completed now the third wave, the computer and internet and biotech and $insert_favourite_kewl_new_technology revolution is happening. Three singularies, not The singularity. Cosma was pushing on a door not just already open, but never closed in the first place.

But it is good to be reminded sometimes that all this talk about singularies and the uniqueness of the technological revolution we’re now living in, part libertarian technofascism, part nerdgasm, is just another test of Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as an Ipad presentation.