Fantastika – Page 95 – Wis[s]e Words

Octocon covering itself in glory

Published on October 7, 2009

[UPDATE 8 October]: Octocon and Pádraig Ó Méalóid have issued a joint statement resolving their issues. Fandom can be sensible, sometimes…

Proof positive that it’s not just giant multinational companies that are clueless about p.r. in the age of the internet, comes the saga of Irish sf convention Octocon banning Irish fan Pádraig Ó Méalóid without providing good reasons. They did this with the incredibly moronic assumption that they could keep this ban quiet when the banned fan is actually quite well known and active online and had no reasons to keep quiet. The ensuing comment thread on the post linked above is a wonder to behold, as one fan after another comes out and says “well, I don’t know anybody involved in this, but boy is this stupid” while the Octocon committee flails around tryind to defend themselves, coming across as increasingly petty.

As Gary Farber notes in the thread, when you ban somebody for credible reasons, nobody makes a fuzz, but then again such bans rarely happen before the convention takes place. So when you do feel you need to pre-emptively ban a fan, especially a wellknown fan, especially when everybody in Irish fandom seems to know there’s bad blood between you and said fan, do so publically, with good reasons and make these reasons know. Don’t try to do it on the sly and don’t do it because he hurt you widdle feelings. No matter how much of an asshole you think he is, banning somebody will only rebound on you otherwise.

UPDATE. It doesn’t help your case if you ban somebody with as sole explanation that it was “due to your behaviour at the convention some time ago and your online behaviour”, say the matter is not open for discussion and will not be discussed with anybody, then complain when Pádraig doesn’t get in touch with you but complains online (and afaik only after the matter became public knowledge anyway). Apart from anything else, it’s not up to him to humbly request why he was banned, it’s up to you to explain it properly in the first place.

John Mullan is a silly ass

Published on September 23, 2009

Booker Prize judge made a bit of a silly ass of himself responding to Kim Stanley Robinson’s challenge to the Booker Prize about the lack of science fiction on its short lists, by saying:

John Mullan, Naughtie’s fellow judge for this year’s prize and professor of English at University College London, said that he “was not aware of science fiction,” arguing that science fiction has become a “self-enclosed world”.

“When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres,” he said, but now “it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”

He’s so wrong. Science fiction has always been “in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other”! Even when he was eighteen this was the case unless he was that age sometime in the early thirties or so, science fiction cons have been around longer than he has. It has never been fully seen as acceptable literature by the sort of people who sit in Booker Prize juries and there has never been “a genre as accepted as other genres” though admittedly there have been times when mainstream authors and critics have been more in tune with it than others.

The responses to such backhanded snobbery are predictable. As seen in the comments to Ken’s post on this, many science fiction fans are defensive and hurt and respond like a teenager bounced from the Kool Kids Klub — “I don’t want to join your smelly club anyway”. Some, as seen on Torque Control ignore the insults and earnestly try to explore the question of why the Bookers boycott science fiction and what to do to change it. Finally, there are the people who’ve seen it all before, amused both by the snobbery and the philistine defensiveness of many fans.

For myself, I’ve sort of lost that reflexive defensiveness, where you take out your annoyance at the casual dismission of science fiction by erm casually dismissing everything else, but I don’t like to entirely dismiss this reflex either as seem to be the trend amongst sections of online fandom. Look at how grownup and above it all we can be, not like those stinky nerds still living in their mommy’s basement who actually take all that stuff seriously. In the high school reenactment society that’s fandom, that’s just pandering to the jocks by making fun of your fellow nerds, not realising they’re laughing at you as much as with you…

The Real-Time World – Christopher Priest

Published on September 20, 2009

Cover of Real-Time World

Real-Time World
Christopher Priest
158 pages
published in 1974

After finishing Camp Concentration I was in the mood for some New Wave science fiction and since I’d just bought this Christopher Priest collection of short stories this was as good a choice as any to read. Most of this I actually read while at the gym, on the treadmill — short stories being ideal, quickly enough read in a forty minute session and not requiring too much sustained concentration like a novel would. Some of the stories in Real-Time World I’d read before, in Dutch translation, some were new to me. All but one of the stories were published between 1970 and 1974, perhaps the height of the New Wave, and all are very much of their time. As a writer Christopher Priest has always seemed more comfortable to me at novel length than at shorter lengths, which is also notable here.

The reason why I wanted to read these stories was because I knew how seventies they were, but as often when confronted with the reality of what I was looking for, I was disappointed with it. None of the stories were entirely satisfactory and although each was competently written, they were written to formula. You could see they were written to achieve a specific effect and how Priest achieves that effect and as a result most of the effect is lost. The first story for example, “The Head and the Hand”, about automutilation as a form of performance art, with some graphic scenes including a final auto-guillotining which may have been shocking when first published, but certainly aren’t now and without this shock effect the story falls apart.

Bitter Angels

Published on August 25, 2009

As James says, this looks like a novel worth looking out for: C.L. Anderson’s Bitter Angels:

So I had a real problem when I decided I wanted to write a story around the idea of a peaceful future. First of all, I wanted a peace that felt achievable by human beings. Furthermore, I wanted to set that peace up in such a way that wouldn’t make people go “oh, BLEEP! If that’s peace gimme my war back.”

[…]

In short, a real, genuine, long-term peace would be a complex, dynamic situation that would have to be constantly maintained. Real peace would require law enforcement, diplomacy, and intelligence services. Real peace might get mistaken for weakness by people who look at places like say, Switzerland and see the cuckoo clocks and the chocolate and don’t see the universal required militia service, and it would have to have plans and training in place to deal with people who might make the mistake of trying to muscle in on its territory.

And that’s just for starters. Then you get to how could you maintain a genuine peace without killing people, without repressing anybody or disappearing people or ideas? Now, that would be tough. That would be dangerous. That would tear an average person apart from the compromises and bleak ideas they’d have to live with and the contact with vile people that you’d just really want to murder but you can’t. Because if you start killing them, their friends and relations might start retaliatory killings and then you’d have to kill more of them, and they’d kill more of you and before you know it you’re right back where you started from.

There’s more at the link, but avoid the comments, many of which consists of internet hard men trying to convince each other how much more clear eyed and level headed they are. What this description reminds me of is the Iain M. Banks Culture stories, only set in a more achievable future. The Culture’s big appeal is that it’s a fantasy at heart, an image of a world that we could never achieve and is therefore safe to dream about. What I hope Bitter Angels will be is a science fiction novel that has this background and uses it for more than just an adventure story.

Because there aren’t that many serious science fiction novels taking place in a near(ish) future that’s recognisable ours with the world in a better shape than it is now. Science fiction tends to prefer darker futures, to go for either utopia or fantasy when writing of futures that are obvious improvements on our own time. You can of course argue that any future that shows humanity spread over the Solar System counts, but all too often you then just get the same old politics and war, just on a larger canvas. If anybody does know of any examples of happy futures, let me know.

The Grain Kings – Keith Roberts

Published on August 16, 2009

Cover of The Grain Kings

The Grain Kings
Keith Roberts
208 pages
published in 1976

Nothing says seventies science fiction as much as a Fossian cover like this, slapped by Panther and Pan on every book they published regardless of contents. Big, blocky machinery, preferably some sort of spaceship, with brigh colours and no human figures: that’s science fiction and you don’t need anything more. For once, the cover is even justified, showing one of the huge grain combine harvesters from the title story of this collection. Course, you’ll still be disappointed if you get this expecting the sort of cool, clinical, techno-driven stories the cover suggests; Keith Roberts isn’t that kind of writer.

Keith Roberts debuted as a writer in 1964 in New Worlds, involved with, but not a part of, the New Wave. Partially this was due to his personality as he allegedly was quite a difficult character to work with, getting into fights with his editors and publishers. But it was also because he was less interested in the two main obsessions of the New Wave, death & entropy and sex & taboos. Nevertheless if you like Brian Aldiss or Christoper Priest changes are you’ll like Roberts as well. Roberts was more than just a writer; during the sixties he worked both as an editor for the British magazine Science Fantasy/SF Impulse, as well as its artistic director, designing most of the covers for it, as well as for several issues of New Worlds. A shame he didn’t get the chance to design the cover of this book, as the impressionist look he used in his own designs would’ve been much more suited for it. Keith Roberts has always been somewhat of a cult author, best known for his second novel Pavane, a classic alternative history story and one out of two of his books still in print today (the other one is The Furies).