Some links

Strange Horizons has put out their science fiction year in review and the interesting thing is: no mention of Iain M. Banks. Funny, for me Surface Detail was one of the best books I read this year, but no peep of it in SH’s list. Reviews elsewhere have been lacklustre as well, something that I’ve noticed before with the previous “new” Culture novels. It’s as if the original three novels have set expectations so high that everything that Banks has done afterwards is consciously or not compared to the impact the original trilogy had. Hardly fair, but perhaps inescapable.

Now for something completely different. We knew crows were clever, but they are even more clever than we thought. New Caledonian crows have long been known to use twigs to pry insects out of trees, but now experiments have proven that these crows know how to adapt their tools for multifunctional use by poking at a rubber spider with a twig. It sounds like nothing, but these are probably the first non-mammal species shown to have the mental capacity and creativity to not only use tools, but adapt them for other uses and, as the Wired article also notes, use them in sequence: using a twig to get a twig to get food. I’ve had co-workers who showed less promise…

Finally, would you like some cheese with that white whine?

Racefail: not just for science fiction anymore

Roxane Gay reads this years Best American Short Stories, finds almost every story in the anthology was about rich or nearly rich white people:

What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story about a mechanic, to bring in that working class perspective and there was a story set in Africa, but most of the stories were uniformly about rich white people (often rich, white old men) doing rich white people things like going on safari or playing poker and learning a painful lesson or lamenting old age in Naples. Each of these stories was wonderful and I don’t regret reading them, but the demographic narrowness is troubling. It’s not right that anyone who isn’t white, straight, or a man, reading a book like this, which is fairly representative of the work being published by the “major” journals, is going to have a hard time finding experiences that might, in some way, mirror their own. It’s not right that the best writing in the country, each year, is writing about white people by white people with a few splashes of color or globalism (Africa! Japan! the hood!) for good effect. Things have certainly improved over the years but that’s not saying much.

At the same time, she also find her own succes being questioned for the usual reasons:

Anytime you achieve even a little bit of success there’s going to be someone who suggests you earned that success because you’re a person of color (or a woman, or both). Even though you might know you achieved your success because you’re awesome, because you worked hard for years, because you beat down doors until one fell down, you are stuck with the niggling doubt that they’re right. You worry that everyone thinks that way so you can never really enjoy your success, you always push yourself to do better, to do more, to be the best, to be so good they have to stop saying it’s just because you’re a person of color. It is exhausting.

All of which confirms the superiority of science fiction and fantasy fandom, as

Most of 2009, the science fiction/fantasy community was embroiled in a contentious debate about race that was so extensive and ongoing that it even got its own name and wiki: RaceFail, but hey, at least the SF/F community is talking about these issues which cannot be said for other writing communities.

Which is surely the most important point to take away from these two posts. More seriously, it’s strangely heartening to see that the problems sf and fantasy struggle with (the representation of non-white/male/straight voices and viewpoints, the problems with appopriation, systemic racism and underrepresentation of people of colour and so on) are not unique to it. It means that it’s not impossible for science fiction/fantasy to change for the better.

Women in science fiction redux

A couple of months ago science fiction blog Torque Control had a lively discussion on “women, sf, and the current British market” and why it was female sf writers still seemed to have a much lower profile than their male counterparts. It inspired me to look at my own reading patterns and to my shock I discovered only ten percent or so of the sf books I’d read the last ten year were by women. Which of course means that I can’t put together a top ten list of the best sf books by female writers of the past decade, as Niall called for from the Torque Control readers. If you’ve only read a handful of books that fit the criteria, it’s pointless to put together a list. But I still want to put some candidates I would include in such a list.

First up is Jo Walton’s Farthing and sequels. Who would think that it was still possible in 2006 to write a “Hitler Wins” alternate history novel and offer a new perspective, but Jo Walton did. She does it by pairing the alternate history with a country house murder mystery, the coziness of that particular subgenre masking the existential horror of the world in which it takes place. As with most alternate histories of this type, some or much of its impact lies in the mismatch of what we know happened in historic reality and what the characters know/believe or allow themselves to know. But by making one of her protagonists a homosexual Scotland Yard inspector, she also makes explicit the continuity between an England that had, if not physically, certainly spiritually surrendered to the nazis and the England of our own reality. England was an anti-semitic, racist, “no dogs/no blacks/no Irish” country in which homosexuals could be hounded to their deaths, before and after World War II. That’s what makes Farthing so chilling, a genuine classic alternate history novel on a par with e.g. The Man in the High Castle.

Second, Mary Gentle’s 1610: a Sundial in a Grave, which does not look like science fiction, but in my personal classificiation it is. I first discovered Mary Gentle back in the eighties with Golden Witchbreed and have always found her a difficult writer, somebody who made you work at her stories, who sometimes seemed to go out of her way to make it more obscure than necessary. It can’t have helped her popularity, but I’ve always found it rewarding to struggle through her books — and she is one of the writers I do struggle with. 1610 is no different, though perhaps because it’s inspired by Alexandre Dumas pseudohistorical novels (Three Musketeers et all), it was surprisingly easy to read. It ticked all the Gentle boxes though: semi-historical, as in Ash told through supposedly translated historical documents and set in the early seventeenth century, a period Gentle returns to again and again. There’s the hermetic magic/science, though less prominent than in some of her other works, as well as the physical realities of adventuring: blood and filth and pain and sex all shown raw, with nothing pretty about it.

Surface Detail – Iain M. Banks

Cover of Surface Detail


Surface Detail
Iain M. Banks
627 pages
published in 2010

The problem with any new Culture novel is that they’ll never be as good as the original three — Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games and Use of Weapons. Back in the late eighties when these books were first published there was literally nothing like them; now we know what the Culture is like, what to expect from Banks and there are whole generations of sf writers who have been influenced by him writing similar sort of novels. Yet everytime I still hope that the next Culture novel is as good as the first three, which is unfair — even if it is, it won’t have the same impact.

But Surface Detail comes close. From his first published book, The Wasp Factory, Banks has had a reputation for writing well crafted but often repulsive scenes of violence and torture and here he surpasses himself. Because in Surface Detail he gives us a horrifying but all too plausible idea: what if you could use virtual realities to create the hells your religion says sinners should be cast down into? What if civilisations routinely went through a stage in their development when their technology was good enough to create simulations of hell, but their morality still primitive enough to actually want to subject people to them? One of the first scenes in the book shows what that would look like from the inside and it’s not for the squeemish; it actually gave me some bad moments reading it just before I went to bed. No cuddly fantasy hell this; imagine whole creative output of an entire species devoted to making up ever more cruel tortures, without end.

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Looking good



A Game of Thrones trailer. Looks good and more importantly, gets the essence of the books right.