Fantastika

The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award

science fiction
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The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award is intended to showcase once important but largely forgotten science fiction/fantasy writers, who’ve often slipped out of print. Since its inception in 2001 it has shown an excellent taste, building up a list of great writers, but there’s something different about this year’s winner. Let’s see, shall we? Since 2001 the following writers have won the award:

  • Olaf Stapledon, 2001: writing outside genre science fiction as a worthy heir to H. G. Wells, novels like Last and First MEn and especially Starmaker were truly cosmic in scale showing how science fiction could escape the petty concerns of everyday life and show how insignificant we really are in the universe, creating an almost religious sense of wonder.
  • R.A. Lafferty, 2002: cynical, sarcastic, the sharpest wit in science fiction, fond of wordplay but never turning it into punishment, his stories always had a strong moral centre even if it was not always easy to find out exactly which moral centre. Nobody wrote like him before him, nobody writes like him now.
  • Edgar Pangborn, 2003: one of the most humane science fiction writers, showing how science fiction could hold up a mirror to observers, that it could focus on people as well as on gadgets.
  • Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, 2004: both were great writers on their own, but together they were also one of the great writing partnerships, in which even they themselves could often not tell who had written which story. C. L. Moore was almost as good a writer of planetary adventures as Leigh Brackett, as well as the creator of one of the great fantasy heroes, Jirel of Joiry, a redheaded warrior popular decades before Roy Thomas would resurrect an obscure Robert E. Howard character as Red Sonja. Kuttner specialised in humourous fantasy and science fiction stories, helping create a truly American fantasy tradition in the spirit of the old European fairy tales.
  • Leigh Brackett, 2005: the best of the heirs of Edgar Rice Burroughs, better even than the man himself, unsurpassed when it comes ot proper planetary romance and science fantasy, as well as the writer for the best Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back
  • William Hope Hodgson, 2006: Edwardian writer of horror, ghost stories and fantasy, still very readable today, his best works The House on the Borderland and The Night Land still impressing modern writers like China Miéville.
  • Daniel F. Galouye, 2007: who wrote a handful of novels, one of which formed the basis of both a seventies German television series directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the 1999 movie The Thirteenth Floor
  • Stanley G. Weinbaum, 2008: died much too young of a particularly nasty cancer but still managed to be the first writer to create truly alien aliens, back in the 1930ties.
  • A. Merritt, 2009: a pulp writer of horror and fantasy, massively popular before World War II with multiple movie adaptations of his stories, a friend and influence on H. P. Lovecraft.
  • Mark Clifton, 2010: co-writer of the worst novel ever to win the Hugo Award.

One of those winners is not like the others… Clifton might not be the worst science fiction writer ever, but does he really need to be rediscovered? Where is the Lionel Fanthorpe Reobscurity Award when you need it?

(via James.)

You have read more Prometheus award winners than you think

science fiction
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Time for another meme. The Prometheus Award is one of the weirder science fiction awards in existence. Supposedly given for the best libertarian or libertarian friendly science fiction novel of the year, the award’s jury persist in rewarding Scottish socialists instead — Ken MacLeod won it three times already. Which means he’s got about two once of gold from them, as the award is a solid gold coin — half an ounce until 2001, a full ounce from then. Charlie Stross and Jo Walton are two other unlikely winners (thought they all used to hang out in rec.arts.sf.written. hmmm). In general, if you look at the list below it’s about evenly divided between fairly obvious libertarian or sympathising authors (L. Neil Smith, who actually founded the award for example) and those like Stross, Walton or MacLeod who just happened to write novels with libertarian themes even if not libertarians themselves and even though the political philosophy in these novels isn’t libertarianism either. This openmindedness is the award’s strength as without the more odd winners, it would be a morass of sucky libertarian power fantasies…

Anyway, usual rules apply: bold if I’ve read it, italics if I own it, both for the obvious and strikethroughs for those books I never ever expect to read. (Meme via James.

  • Dani & Eytan Kollin, The Unincorporated Man
  • Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
  • Harry Turtledove, The Gladiator
  • Jo Walton, Ha’penny
  • Charles Stross, Glasshouse
  • Ken MacLeod, Learning the World
  • Neal Stephenson, The System of the World
  • F. Paul Wilson, Sims
  • Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • Donald Kingsbury, Psychohistorical Crisis
  • L. Neil Smith, The Forge of the Elders
  • Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
  • John Varley, The Golden Globe
  • Ken MacLeod, The Stone Canal
  • Victor Koman, Kings of the High Frontier
  • Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction
  • Poul Anderson, The Stars are also Fire
  • L. Neil Smith, Pallas
  • James P. Hogan, The Multiplex Man
  • Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, Fallen Angels
  • Michael Flynn, In the Country of the Blind
  • Victor Koman, Solomon’s Knife
  • Brad Linaweaver, Moon of Ice
  • Victor Koman, The Jehovah Contract
  • Vernor Vinge, Marooned in Realtime
  • Victor Milan, Cybernetic Samurai
  • J. Neil Schulman, The Rainbow Cadenza
  • James P. Hogan, Voyage from Yesteryear
  • L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach
  • F. Paul Wilson, Wheels Within Wheels

Yes, basically all the echt-libertarians (as well as Hogan, who was more of a loon) are not authors I ever plan on reading. The Niven, Pournelle and Flynn wankfest only escapes because I read it already when younger and dumber.

Paolo Bacigalupi: threat or menace?

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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Every few years or so a science fiction writer comes along who becomes the darling of the critics, especially mainstream critics deigning to notice the genre, but whose qualities on closer inspection seem to be mostly so much hot air. Stephen Baxter was one of those writers, praised by Locus for his hard science fiction, winning award after award in the nineties, but never doing anything for me. Today it’s Paolo Bacigalupi, praised for his realism and worldbuilding and his non-western settings. His first novel, The Windup Girl just won the Nebula and Locus Awards. All good stuff, right, but why when reading descriptions like the one below and this from a positive review do I feel queasy?

In essence, Emiko has been designed to be a supremely beautiful, compliant geisha. Obedience has been built into her DNA. Her skin has been made ivory smooth by reducing the size of her pores. Never intended to function in a tropical climate, Emiko has nonetheless been callously abandoned in Bangkok: Her patron decided “to upgrade new in Osaka.” She was then bought by the unscrupulous Raleigh, a survivor of “coups and counter-coups, calorie plagues and starvation,” who now “squats like a liver-spotted toad in his Ploenchit ‘club,’ smiling in self-satisfaction as he instructs newly arrived foreigners in the lost arts of pre-Contraction debauch.”

If not out and out racist (and of course, filtered through Michael Dirda’s review), this is orientalist to say the least, delving into the old stereotypes of the Far East and justifying it with genetic mumbo jumbo. It may just be an unfortunate element in this story, but then there’s his traveling through China story in Salon:

I’m not proud of it, but I’m a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie and things are smooth. Every once in a while I don’t just lie to smooth the way, I lie for fun. Once, I told a taxi driver in Beijing that I’d been studying Chinese for a week. This, after having painfully studied the language for four years and lived and worked (and lied) in Beijing for another year. I think I even told him that Chinese was an easy language to learn. Perhaps most people wouldn’t think that’s funny, but it was the only time a Chinese person ever told me my Chinese was very good and really meant it.

My restaurant companion looked at me more closely and asked, “And what do you think of the Chinese people?”

Cold and heartless, but nice if you’re in their clique of friends. “They’re great, too,” I said.

Which makes me go hmmm again. It’s all a bit dodgy even without the genetically engineered elephants powering factories and the huge metal springs serving as batteries…

The Fantasy Masterworks – how many have you read?

fantasy, posts interesting only to me
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An easy post to start off the weekend. A wweek ago I asked how many science fiction masterworks y’all had read, today it’s the turn of the Fantasy Masterworks. Somewhat less succesful than the first series, only fifty books were released in it. This relative lack of succes may be explained by the schizophrenic nature of the series. Most of the books published were well known and much loved genre classics, by writers like Dunsany, Leigh Brackett or Zelazny, but the more modern books tended towards the more literary end of the spectrum, with writers like Jonathan Carroll , Sheri Tepper or John Crowley. Nothing wrong with that, but not everybody’s cup of tea.

Some strange choices there as well: Song of Kali is not a good book, let alone a Fantasy Masterwork. (Who was it who said something like “this book does to India what the Black Death did to Europe”?) You could also argue that some of the books here are more at home amongst the science fiction masterworks, but that’s always going to be the case.

Anyway, here comes the bragging. As per usual, in bold are the ones I’ve read, italic means I’ve got them in my library and both means the obvious.

1 – The Book of the New Sun, Volume 1: Shadow and Claw – Gene Wolfe
2 – Time and the Gods – Lord Dunsany
3 – The Worm Ouroboros – E.R. Eddison
4 – Tales of the Dying Earth – Jack Vance
5 – Little, Big – John Crowley
6 – The Chronicles of Amber – Roger Zelazny
7 – Viriconium – M. John Harrison
8 – The Conan Chronicles, Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle – Robert E. Howard
9 – The Land of Laughs – Jonathan Carroll
10 – The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea – L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
11 – Lud-in-the-Mist – Hope Mirrlees
12 – The Book of the New Sun, Volume 2: Sword and Citadel – Gene Wolfe
13 – Fevre Dream – George R. R. Martin
14 – Beauty – Sheri S. Tepper
15 – The King of Elfland’s Daughter – Lord Dunsany
16 – The Conan Chronicles, Volume 2: The Hour of the Dragon – Robert E. Howard
17 – Elric – Michael Moorcock
18 – The First Book of Lankhmar – Fritz Leiber
19 – Riddle-Master – Patricia A. McKillip
20 – Time and Again – Jack Finney
21 – Mistress of Mistresses – E.R. Eddison
22 – Gloriana or the Unfulfill’d Queen – Michael Moorcock
23 – The Well of the Unicorn – Fletcher Pratt
24 – The Second Book of Lankhmar – Fritz Leiber
25 – Voice of Our Shadow – Jonathan Carroll

Three women in the first twentyfive entries; that’s better than the science fiction masterworks series already.

26 – The Emperor of Dreams – Clark Ashton Smith
27 – Lyonesse I: Suldrun’s Garden – Jack Vance
28 – Peace – Gene Wolfe
29 – The Dragon Waiting – John M. Ford
30 – Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe – Michael Moorcock
31 – Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams – C.L. Moore
32 – The Broken Sword – Poul Anderson
33 – The House on the Borderland and Other Novels – William Hope Hodgson
34 – The Drawing of the Dark – Tim Powers
35 – Lyonesse II and III: The Green Pearl and Madouc – Jack Vance
36 – The History of Runestaff – Michael Moorcock
37 – A Voyage to Arcturus – David Lindsay
38 – Darker Than You Think – Jack Williamson
39 – The Mabinogion – Evangeline Walton
40 – Three Hearts & Three Lions – Poul Anderson
41 – Grendel – John Gardner
42 – The Iron Dragon’s Daughter – Michael Swanwick
43 – WAS – Geoff Ryman
44 – Song of Kali – Dan Simmons
45 – Replay – Ken Grimwood
46 – Sea Kings of Mars and Other Worldly Stories – Leigh Brackett
47 – The Anubis Gates – Tim Powers
48 – The Forgotten Beasts of Eld – Patricia A. McKillip
49 – Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
50 – The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales – Rudyard Kipling

And four more women in the last twentyfive. Still nowhere near enough, but still better than in the other series.

Who would want to be Harlan Ellison now?

science fiction
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Harlan Ellison. Harlan Ellison. Some years ago I bought a collection of his work, but didn’t read it right away. By the time I did read it, he had grabbed Connie Willis’s tit when she was the guest of honor at the Hugo Awards. Thus, when I finally read it, every story ended, for me, in “and then he grabbed Connie Willis’s tit at the Hugo Awards.”

“I Have No Mouth but I Must Grab Connie Willis’s Tit.”

— laurenpburka.

Last week the news broke that Harlan Ellison had left the internet, again. Never comfortable with it in the first place, a fairly innoceous post at Io9 drawing attention to his rare books sale drove him over the edge and off the net for the third or forth time this decade. Since HE rarely ventured outside the confines of his stone age website I doubt few beyond the coterie of dedicated fans assembled there would’ve know or cared he was on the net in the first place.

For somebody who was used to having his spats divide fandom this must be awful, but the sad fact is that Ellison has outlived his own fame. His heyday was before Star Wars when science fiction was still small; his best work is three to four decades old, his new work negligible. Anybody who started reading science fiction or entered fandom since 1990 (or even 1980) need never have encountered him, other than through secondhand stories like in the quote above.

Ellison always had an ego and was capable of backing it up as well, but looking back his knack for self promotion made him seem much important than he really was. Objectively he was a good science fiction writer with at least a dozen or so classic stories to his name, responsible for at least one important anthology (Dangerous Visions), while also having some success as a screenwriter for both television and movies, as well as an accomplished essayist. He has had a career he can be proud of, but so have hundreds of other writers. It’s quite possible to be well read in science fiction and never have touched an Ellison story.

Which is the essential tragedy of being Harlan Ellison in 2010. While he has slowly changed from an angry young man into a cranky old geezer, his fans and detractors aged along with him, while new generations of fans and readers never got to know him other than as some old guy with anger management issues.