“I’ve always been fascinated that the first president of that first US fan group—indeed, the world’s first fan group—was a black guy, Warren Fitzgerald, and that they held their early meetings at his home in Harlem. I’m amazed this doesn’t seem to be widely known.”
One of the subthemes running through the RaceFail debacle in the early months of this year was the “invisiblity” of people of colour within fandom. White fans were noting the lack of fans of colour, while they in turn were annoyed by the often well intended, widespread idea among white fans that science fiction just wasn’t attractive enough to people of colour. Quite a few heated threats revolved around this dichotomy, with fans of colour trying to convince their white counterparts that the appeal of science fiction wasn’t the issue, that there were actually quite a few of them around, but they just weren’t noticed… That the first president of the world’s first fan group was Black and nobody knew this fits perfectly.
Buy Jupiter
Isaac Asimov
238 pages
published in 1975
It’s hard to know for sure at this late date, but Buy Jupiter, together with I, Robot, was probably the first science fiction book I’ve ever read. one of the. I must have been seven or eight years old or so and this and the few other adult science fiction books the local library had in its childrens section instilled a lifelong love of the genre. It was therefore with some sense of nostalgia that I reread this book for the first time in years — these stories were like old friends to me. Nostalgia can be a dangerous guide of course, as so many books can turn out to have been visited by the suck fairy since you last time you’ve read them, not to mention the racism or sexism fairy. Luckily none of them have been busy on Buy Jupiter, the stories were just as good as I remembered.
This despite the fact that Buy Jupiter is a bit of a strange collection, filled with twentyfive years of leftover stories. There isn’t any classic in this, no one story you would put in a Best of Asimov collection but this might actually its strength. Because it’s a filler collection, because most of the stories are short or very short, you get a huge variation of stories and subjects, a smorgasbord of Asimov’s fiction. A good introduction to science fiction as well, though even at the time I first read those stories they were already dated — you don’t pick up on that as a child anyway.
The best reason to celebrate the fact that Dollhouse Joss “feminist” Whedon’s latest crappy science fiction show with dodgy sexual policies was cancelled, is the giant whingefest its fans went on when K. Tempest Bradford voiced her pleasure at its disappearance. Best bit:
It’s a matter of simple courtesy: when someone’s best friend dies, you don’t say, “Well, it’s for the best–he was a real DOUCHE,” even if it’s one-hundred percent true. Show some respect for the recently departed, or at least show some respect for the recently departed’s grieving friends.
Dear oh dear. The crybaby faction in fandom is alive and well. Fair enough that fans of the show will lament its loss, but to demand that everybody validate them in their grief is just toolish. And actually comparing it to the death of a friend is just plain stupid.
In a desparate bid to show that it’s not just “literary” writers like Margaret Atwood who can have a rod up their ass about writing genre novels, here’s Terry Goodkind:
First of all, I don’t write fantasy. I write stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It’s either about magic or a world-building. I don’t do either.
He is right that he doesn’t write fantasy: he writes extrued fantasy product only distinguishable from all other efp series by an obsession with S&M and objectivism. Twat.
However simple the central conceit, “Uncommon Sense” nicely demonstrates the central idea of Clement’s fiction: investigating the world will enable you to make sense of it and, very often, benefit in the process. Cunningham may look, superficially, like a Heinleinesque Competent Man, but he differs in having the kind of detailed curiosity I’ve described. Heinlein’s heroes tend to win out because of the strength of their belief, because they’re right but the world doesn’t know it (quite) yet. Clement’s heroes tend to win out because their faith in empiricism is ultimately rewarded. (The unspoken axiom there, of course, is that empiricisim is sufficient to solve any problems that may come along. It’s no surprise, then, that Clement’s stories tend to be arranged so that this indeed is the case. The question of how often a situation like the one in “Uncommon Sense” might arise in everyday life is not addressed.) There are a couple more arguments that might be made against Clement’s worldview. First is that empiricism tends to trump all other values — contemporary readers might balk a little at the scene in “Uncommon Sense” where he kills the crab-creatures just on the off-chance that he might find out things about them. The second is that he’s not particularly interested in character. Characters have traits, to be sure — Cunningham is determined, the two men who have highjacked his ship are “villains.” But any idea of a more rounded selfhood is very rare in Clement.
Other science fiction writers that fit this description are Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Forward, amongst others (yes, they tend to be male). That’s the sort of science fiction I grew up with, somewhat lacking perhaps in the characterisation or literary departments, but as Graham says, promoting a worldview in which experimentation and rational thought are key to understanding the universe, where it didn’t matter what your shape was, as long as you could talk the language of Science (even if most of the heroes of these stories were of solid Anglosaxon stock). It’s a kind of science fiction that can’t really be written anymore today, as we expect more than just clever puzzles in our stories. Nevertheless there is value in them; the best of them show you how scientific reasoning works, that the universe can be understood and reasoned with. Hal Clement was a master at this and you could do worse than to check out his best story, Mission of Gravity, in which the planet Mesklin, with its oblong shape and gravity varying from 3g at the equator to 275 or so g at the poles is the star, a great example of worldbuilding grounded in science as well as how to make a didactic story worth reading.
Moving on, this series of photographs of dead albatross chicks stuffed full with plastic is, as Paul McAuley says, very Ballardian, but also upsetting. These albatrosses nest at Midway in the middle of the Pacific and when the parent birds set out to find food for their chicks, they instead return home with plastic garbage, from the huge floating plastic trash fields that collect in the North Pacific, trapped by the North Pacific Gyre. This is actually a problem that afflicts every ocean, with no easy solution in sight.
Ballardian was also a word used on the BBC4’s synthpop weekend, as more than one early eighties synth pioneers explained the inspiration they got from Ballard, something I was sure Owen would’ve mentioned. Instead he concentrated on the dept post-punk owned to modernist and brutalist architecture, something also mentioned by more than one artist on the documentary. It’s kind of obvious when you look at it, the clear, stark lines of the fifties and sixties architecture these bands grew up in echoed in the cold, “inhuman” sounds of their music, both fascinated and repulsed by the dehumanisation inherent in high modernist technology, just as this was about to disappear from the cities and towns they grew up in. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that many of these bands came from dying industrial towns, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, all later to be transformed into post-modern shopping ‘n art wastelands in the eighties and nineties).
What struck me personally, both in the interviews and the clips, was the lack of computers. The whole micro computer revolution, already taking shape in California at the same time completely passed these bands by, using synthesisers, drum computers and tape recorders as purely mechanical instruments. (The musical soundtrack to the pc revolution was always more likely to be progrock than synthpop anyway.) In some ways you could call this the last music from the industrial age, the last truly modern, future looking genre. After that post-modernism and the end of history comes in and there’s no longer room for linear ideas of progress and such.
