Fantastika – Page 88 – Wis[s]e Words

James P. Hogan 27 June 1941 – 12 July 2010

Published on July 13, 20105 Comments

Via James Nicoll comes the news that science fiction writer James P. Hogan died yesterday. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. Though he never was a favourite of mine, I did like Inherit the Stars and its first two sequels, yet his descent into kookery and crank science was noticable even then. Embarassing enough that he believed in Immanuel Velikovsky’s theories about the Solar System, which would’ve Venus as a “cosmic egg” birthed by Jupiter whose passage through the Solar System to its current position caused the Biblical plagues in Egypt, worse when he moved on from that relatively innocent belief into disbelieving that HIV causes AIDS, that evolution and climate change are real, but it became truely awful once he got skeptical about the Holocaust as well. He long remained circumspect in stating this skepticism other than to defend the right of various odious rightwingers and nazis to deny the Holocaust, but recent remarks left on his website leave no real doubt about his beliefs:

But when an entire nation is accused of murder on a mass scale, claims that are wildly fantastic, mutually contradictory, and defy common sense and often physical possibility are allowed to stand unchallenged, truth is openly declared to be irrelevant, no evidence for defense is admitted, and even defense attorneys for the accused can be charged and imprisoned as being guilty of the same offense. Need it be said that truth does not need this kind of protection?

Which is why the momentary twinge of sadness I’d normally feel in these circumstances is muted with the relief that at least I don’t have to read about his latest embarassements anymore. I don’t think Hogan actually embraced Holocaust denial out of evil, like those neonazis who are all too willing to celebrate it in private but know it’s good p.r. to disbelieve it in public. Even if not actively evil himself though, his advocacy did help evil, make it easier to pretend Holocaust Denial is a respectable if controversial position to make, that the existence of the Holocaust is something that can be debated rather than historical fact. His stance on other socalled controversies as mentioned above isn’t that innocent either. We’ve seen the damage climate change denial has done to slow down the fight against it and you can image how much damage can be done by denying the link between HIV and AIDS, when you already have widespread folk beliefs helping speed up infection rates e.g. in various African countries.

As such Hogan could function as the poster child for engineer’s disease, a terrible warning for what can happen if intelligent, clever people think they’re much more cleverer than they really are, too clever to believe the “obvious lies of the scientific establishment”. Hogan was trained as a design engineer but quickly moved into sales as his first career, before he started writing science fiction. It’s the perfect background for catching the crackpot bug. Not trained in doing science but rather in enginering, not smart enough or too arrogant to understand his own limitations, clever enough to spot the flaws in pop science stories but again not clever enough to realise that these stories are not the whole truth. It was this misplaced skepticism and overestimation of his own abilities that started innocent enough but led him to some very dark places.

Pushing the envelope only results in papercuts

Published on July 9, 2010

Two comments by Jonathan M. from this thread at Torque Control brutally taken out of context:

I must admit to not understanding a) why one would write stuff that didn’t consciously push the envelope

[…]

I think that ‘pushing the envelope’ is a more useful term than avantgarde simply as a short-hand way of saying “don’t do what other people are doing”. Which is kind of a mantra for the postmodern age.

I always thought the essence of our postmodern age was the realisation that everything had been done and said already and worse, it is all still available at the click of a button, legally or otherwise on the internets. It’s pointless trying to go for the shock of the new, because there is nothing so new as to be shocking anymore; it’s a mug’s game.

New things are not in themselves more interesting than old ideas done well. Nobody will ever be surprised much by a new Terry Pratchett novel, yet I so much rather have him do several more Discworld books than attempting something novel. There’s a pleasure in seeing a familiar concept being done well.

The Science Fiction Masterworks – how many have you read?

Published on July 7, 20106 Comments

A bunch of lunatics have decided to review all the books in the Gollancz Science Fiction and Fantasy Masterworks series. These series were actually started by the Millennium publishing group about a decade or so ago, but taken over by Gollancz a few years later. Before that it had published its own short series of masterworks, all in the classic yellow Gollancz Science Fiction jacket. (It used to be I could spot any likely sf book in the local library just by looking out for that colour…)

Anyway, this is why there are two list of science fiction masterworks down below. The first list are the original Gollanzc novels, the second list the true Millennium/Gollancz series. It would’ve been a bit much to also add the Fantasy Masterworks, which are another fifty titles or so and which is no longer being added to. 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.

I – Dune – Frank Herbert
II – The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
III – The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
IV – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
V – A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
VI – Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
VII – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
VIII – Ringworld – Larry Niven
IX – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
X – The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham

A fairly conservative list of established classics that nobody can have great problems with. Some traditional work from Niven and Heinlein, some British classics from Clarke and Wyndham, some New Wave.

1 – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
2 – I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
3 – Cities in Flight – James Blish
4 – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
5 – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
6 – Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
7 – Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
8 – The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe
9 – Gateway – Frederik Pohl
10 – he Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
11 – Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
12 – Earth Abides – George R. Stewart
13 – Martian Time-Slip – Philip K. Dick
14 – The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
15 – Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
16 – The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
17 – The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard
18 – The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
19 – Emphyrio – Jack Vance
20 – A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
21 – Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
22 – Behold the Man – Michael Moorcock
23 – The Book of Skulls – Robert Silverberg
24 – The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
25 – Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes

Multiple Dicks but only one woman in the first twentyfive books in the series. Much “legacy” science fiction (Wells, Stapledon, Matheson, Stewart) and a tendency towards the more literary end of science fiction, though all established enough to not be controversial. Some strange choices though — why The Book of Skulls as the first Silverberg?

26 – Ubik – Philip K. Dick
27 – Timescape – Gregory Benford
28 – More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
29 – Man Plus – Frederik Pohl
30 – A Case of Conscience – James Blish
31 – The Centauri Device – M. John Harrison
32 – Dr. Bloodmoney – Philip K. Dick
33 – Non-Stop – Brian Aldiss
34 – The Fountains of Paradise – Arthur C. Clarke
35 – Pavane – Keith Roberts
36 – Now Wait for Last Year – Philip K. Dick
37 – Nova – Samuel R. Delany
38 – The First Men in the Moon – H. G. Wells
39 – The City and the Stars – Arthur C. Clarke
40 – Blood Music – Greg Bear
41 – Jem – Frederik Pohl
42 – Bring the Jubilee – Ward Moore
43 – VALIS – Philip K. Dick
44 – The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. Le Guin
45 – The Complete Roderick – John Sladek
46 – Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
47 – The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
48 – Grass – Sheri S. Tepper
49 – A Fall of Moondust – Arthur C. Clarke
50 – Eon – Greg Bear

Two women this time, more Dicks, more Clarke and Wells. The Aldiss entry is again a minor work.

51 – The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
52 – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
53 – The Dancers at the End of Time – Michael Moorcock
54 – The Space Merchants – Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
55 – Time Out of Joint – Philip K. Dick
56 – Downward to the Earth – Robert Silverberg
57 – The Simulacra – Philip K. Dick
58 – The Penultimate Truth – Philip K. Dick
59 – Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
60 – Ringworld – Larry Niven
61 – The Child Garden – Geoff Ryman
62 – Mission of Gravity – Hal Clement
63 – A Maze of Death – Philip K. Dick
64 – Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
65 – Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
66 – Life During Wartime – Lucius Shepard
67 – Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
68 – Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
69 – Dark Benediction – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
70 – Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
71 – Dune – Frank Herbert
72 – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
73 – The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
74 – Inverted World – Christopher Priest
75 – Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
76 – The Island of Dr. Moreau- H.G. Wells
77 – Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
78 – The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
79 – Dhalgren – Samuel R. Delany – (July 2010)
80 – Helliconia – Brian Aldiss – (August 2010)
81 – Food of the Gods – H.G. Wells – (Sept. 2010)
82 – The Body Snatchers – Jack Finney – (Oct. 2010)
83 – The Female Man – Joanna Russ – (Nov. 2010)
84 – Arslan – M.J. Engh – (Dec. 2010)

Three women in the last thirtyfour books of the series. Still not very much and a lots of repeats again in the authors that appear. A bit too conservative in the end, even if every book in the series is worth reading.

Sensawunda

Published on June 27, 2010

Centauri Dreams on the increasingly many brown dwarf stars that are being found in our stellar neighbourhood and how cool they are:

In fact, it gives me pause to reflect that the focaccia I baked the night before last needed higher temperatures (500 degrees Fahrenheit) than the coolest of these brown dwarfs can supply. Most of the new objects in the Spitzer study are T dwarfs, the coolest class of brown dwarfs known, defined as being less than 1500 Kelvin (1226 degrees Celsius). One of the dwarfs in this study is cold enough that it may represent the hypothetical class called Y dwarfs, part of a classification created by a co-author of the paper, Davy Kirkpatrick (Caltech).

Brown dwarfs may be the most common stellar objects around as this representation shows. You wonder if brown dwarfs could have planets and if so, whether those planets could have life on them and if so, how it’s adapted to the extremely cold temperatures such planets must suffer from. Of course, from a hypothetical intelligent species arising on a planet around a brown dwarf, we ourselves would be exotic extremophilic lifeforms: imagine being able to exist at temperatures where water is a liquid!

Mainstream writers and science fiction

Published on June 24, 20103 Comments

Typical. For the second time in a week somebody pulled a post I had set aside to respond to. This time it’s Will Ellwood who got cold feet and deleted his post on whether you can get too old to write science fiction. To be honest, it is an incoherent and rambling post, one of those where you can see the writer isn’t sure themselves what their points are, if any, but if I had to delete all my incoherent posts… Luckily Google remembers everything, because hidden in the jumble was an interesting point:

Often literary writers who have a go at writing what seems to be genre fiction get derided and mocked by genre fans for being unoriginal and clichéd. But are literary writers like Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Cormac McCarthy writing classical SF which is based around the question of ‘what if?’ or are they writing allegories and metaphor about the human condition which use the tools of SF as emphasis?

I would argue that to attempt to critique ‘The Road’ as a traditional post-apocalyptic novel would fail, as the novel is not an example of speculative world building and exploration, but a meditation on many themes. Not least the theme of a relationship between a dying father and his son in hopeless circumstances. To attempt such a critique would be to be genuinely and wilfully interpreting the book wrong.

Ellwood is riffing here on an earlier post by Damien G. Walter on whether or not new science fiction writers need to know their genre history:

But is knowing the history of SF essential to becoming a writer in the genre? On the one hand SF can be considered as an ongoing conversation spanning decades. It you enter that conversation without knowing what has already been said, you are not liable to say much of interest to people who have been following the arguments unfold for decades. But on the other hand if SF is a genre that seeks to find meaning in modern life, raw responses to that life might be mire interesting than viewpoints filtered through the mirror shaded gaze of the SF genre.

Ellwood argues that judging mainstream writers in genre terms when they’re attempting science fiction is missing the point, while Walters finds that it might even work in a writer’s favour to be ignorant of the genre. Both are provocative arguments in a field that has always had a bit of an inferiority complex when comparing itself to the literary mainstream. An inferiority complex fed by the frequent denial of mainstream writers dabbling in science fiction that they do so, of which Margaret Atwood is the most prominent recent examplar. It also galls that so often inferior works of mainstream writers are praised for their originality when so often they’re rote reworkings of old, old science fiction ideas and some never recognised sf writer has done it much better much earlier.

However, it’s not the 1970ties anymore and science fiction, though still routinely portrayed as an activity practised by spotty nerds living in their parents basement, has become ubiqitous, something you can’t help but be aware off, similar to how most people have some understanding of football (be it proper football or the American version) even if not interested in the game. Contemporary writers like David “not the comedian” Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy start with a much greater familiarity with science fiction than earlier writers could have. The science fiction ghetto has long since had its walls torn down and besides which, those walls have always been a lot less high than some sf fans like to believe. Heck, roughly half the writer entries in Clute and Nicholl’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction are from outside the genre.

All of which means both Ellwood and Walters are right, up to a point. It is pointless to judge mainstream writers using science fiction as a tool for not adhering to traditional sfnal strengths like worldbuilding or sense of wonder when that’s not their intent. In Walters’ words, these writers may not be interested in joining the conversation sf as a genre is engaged in. Which is fair enough.

Yet having other priorities does not excuse a writer from getting the science fiction elements right. It is possible to critique The Road on its worldbuilding and unoriginality while still acknowledging its other strengths, to recognise that it stands in a long tradition of post-apocalyptic works, both genre and non-genre. And if people like Michael Chabon — who really should know better — insist that it isn’t science fiction, this should be protested. Science fiction’s own achievements should not be swept under the carpet just because some more literary acceptable writer has taken a shine to the subject. To be fair though, this seems to be more of a critic’s disease, with writers putting on some protective colouring not to be tarred by outdated notions about sf’s illegitimacy by those critics.

If we look at the big picture we may see that science fiction, which had a long prehistory of being proper literature before becoming a real genre in the safety of the pulp ghetto, may migrate back into the literary mainstream again, eventually just becoming one option amongst many for a writer. At the moment it’s almost where the detective story was in the seventies: acceptable for respectable writers to dabble in, as long as they don’t take it too seriously.