Fantastika – Page 97 – Wis[s]e Words

Forty years ago today

Published on July 20, 2009

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon

And only fifteen years after Tintin, Snowy and captain Haddock, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, as the first non-fictional characters to do so. All skepticism about what Apollo accomplished aside, it was a hell of an achievement, to get human beings walking another world in less than a decade. that Apollo then didn’t lead to a permanent presence on the moon is a pity, at least for this science fiction fan, but it should not distract us from this triumph.

To rate “the space programme” on what it did for us back on Earth, as they’re doing over at Charlie’s, may be interesting but missing the point. Most of those socalled spinoffs always turn out to be not invented for the space race, much of the rest never needed manned spaceflight to get them going. If we’re looking at space exploration from a purely “economic” point of view, we don’t need more than communications, weather and GPS satellites; certainly not manned space flight or space exploration.

Who cares about what Apollo did for us? People walked the fucking moon!

Speed is not the only measure of progress, unless you are Jeremy Clarkson

Published on July 17, 2009

in a discussion about what would happen once “Moore’s Law” no longer holds true over at James Nicoll’s place, Charlie Stross said the following:

And then there’ll be a huge recession and layoffs, just as there was in aerospace around 1970 when the industry hit a performance wall (note that airliners today fly no faster than they did in 1970 — Concorde’s champagne quaffing elite aside, travel at over Mach 0.9 is not commercially sustainable).

To which Alex Harrowell took exception

Forget Princess Margaret. Civil aviation only became interesting economically or sociologically after Charlie’s performance wall – we’ve had David Frost commuting for the BBC from London to New York, we’ve had Easyjet ravers/poverty jetset types bouncing from sofa to sofa around Europe, Viktor Bout’s inverted triangle trade shipping diamonds out of Africa and guns in, enabled by cheap Antonov-12s and international free trade zones, Kenyan farmers discovering they could get backload freight to Europe for pence. Before the “performance wall”, people watched movies about air hostesses; after, they actually flew.

Shades of endless rec.arts.sf.written discussions about the slowing down of progress, as measured by the speed of air travel. “We went from the Wright brothers to supersonic flight in less then fifty years and since then we’ve only gone backwards”. It’s even worse with space travel of course, with the complaints of how we went to the moon in ’69 and now can’t even get the shuttle in orbit; the fortieth anniversary celebrations aren’t helping either. The horrible truth about science fiction is that a lot of it is obsessed with Top Gear notions of progress: more power, more speed, bored with everything else.

Science fiction got its start in the twenties, a decade that was absolutely bursting with this kind of easy to understand technological progress: the maturing of radio into a mass medium, the development of the airplane into something that could cross the Atlantic, the first stirrings of television and rocketry, giant new insights in the nature of our universe, the atom, etc. Science fiction surfed this wave of techno-optimism until roughly the early sixties, but since then it has had to confront the reality that all its dreams were actually quit a bit harder to realise than it had made it seem. Easy travel to other planets, human-like robots, unmetered atomic power, artificial intelligence, flying bloody cars: all dreams that didn’t come true, or came true in ways that didn’t fit the Glorious Science Fiction Future. It’s no wonder the New Wave, the first movement in science fiction to not just question its assumptions, but even wonder out loud how important or even interesting these assumptions were in the first place, happened at the same time.

While the best science fiction has long since digested the reality that technological progress is hard, non-linear and more interesting in what it makes possible than in what it can do, there are still plenty of fans who think that just because their daily lives look superficially similar to how they lived ten or twenty years ago, there hasn’t been any progress. For those fans the idea that Moore’s law will end means their last big hope at getting to the technoutopia of their dreams, the Singularity, has ended. Charlie isn’t one of them, however; I think he was just a bit sloppy in the example he chose.

The Best of Murray Leinster

Published on June 28, 2009

Cover of The Best of Murray Leinster

The Best of Murray Leinster
Murray Leinster
368 pages
published in 1978

Yesterday was Murray Leinster day in Virginia set up to honour one of science fiction’s pioneer writers. Murray Leinster started writing science fiction before it even existed as a genre, 1919 with the story “The Runaway Skyscraper” for pulp magazines like Argosy. When Hugo Gernsback created the world’s first dedicated science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories in 1926, Leinster was there, with “The Runaway Skyscraper” reprinted in the July issue. Leinster continued to write science fiction through the Campbell revolution of the late thirties and forties, when the higher writing standards Campbell demanded were too much for many pulp writers and kept being published throughout the fifties and sixties. Though he wrote in other genres, science fiction always seemed to be his first love and several of his stories were first: the first story to predict the internet, the first alternate worlds story, one of the classic stories of first contact.

All of which is why I read this, The Best of Murray Leinster, as a short of honour, a way to remember one of science fiction’s pioneers. This is one of a series of absolutely brilliant short story collections put out by Ballentine/Del Rey in the seventies, collecting the best stories of the socalled Golden Age science fiction writers: people like Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett and Murray Leinster. Though long out of print as far as I known, this series can still be easily found in secondhand bookstores and is well worth searching out. As far as possible the collections were selected by the authors themselves, but sadly Leinster had already died by the time this collection was published. Instead it was edited by J. J. Pierce, who did quite a few of these. It’s a great selection, including the three stories I alluded to above.

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

Published on June 25, 2009

Cover of The Gone-Away World

The Gone-Away World
Nick Harkaway
532 pages
published in 2008

Whoa.

Now I understand why The Gone-Away World was one of last year’s most discussed science fiction books. I’d noticed the fuzz but not gotten my hands on a copy until yesterday when I checked it out of the library for beach reading, but once I got it home it gripped me and didn’t let me go until I’d finished it late at night after everybody else had gone to bed. Books like that are rare and you always finish them with a hint of regret that a pleasurable journey is over. And The Gone-Away World is very much a journey type of book, with plenty of amusing diversions along the way asnd in no hurry to reach its destination.

In fact, most of The Gone-Away World after the first chapter is a hugely extended flashback, only catching up to the present three fifths of the way through the story. Some may find this annoying enough to argue that the book would’ve been better off without that teaser. Personally I disagree, I think this structure was necessary. The “teaser” is there to get you interested in the world Harkaway has created, while the extended flashback explains both the personal history of the narrator and the world he lives in and how it came to be. When you rejoin the action after the flashback this added and detailed history gives added weight and poignancy to what happens next. It wouldn’t have worked if it had been in strict chronological order.

Andy Remic should just fuck off

Published on June 12, 20094 Comments

Some of the more thin skinned science fiction writers, as well as a certain breed of fan overeager to make everybody part of Club SF, have been whinging again about negative reviews. It’s the usual guff: “there are too many negative reviews”, “it’s all so meanspirited”, “positive reviews are soo much more interesting” and so on. So far, so tedious. But somebody had to take it one step further. One Andy Remic, a published writer though you wouldn’t in a million years guess it from his blog prose, has started the socalled ” Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics project” which, in his own words (scroll down):

I believe there is a new wave coming. A new wave of positive genre fiction, as can be seen in de Vries Shine anthology, but also a positive movement in the industry and community. I believe there’s a lot of people out there sick of the constant whining and moaning and tearing down – after all, it’s much easier to destroy than create. That’s why myself, and so many other brilliant authors, are involved with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics project (the SFFE) because we want to promote a positive attitude in the industry, and make and ethical stand against the constant poison and vitriol which, I think, has been invading and escalating for a long time.

I chose the name “Ethics” not because I wanted to explore the ethical contexts of novels or films, but because I wanted to make an ethical stand against the motherfuckers who, to my mind, are systematically ruining the SFFH genres. In short, I wanted to do what I believed was intrinsically, morally, ethically and intuitively right. I want to celebrate everything that is good in SFFH, because it’s all subjective, right?? – and, hopefully, we can lead by positive example.

Shorter Andy Remic: I want to remake science fiction in my own image through the power of positive reviews. Not that science fiction needs remaking, certainly not by making criticism more upbeat and “positive”. Science fiction is far too protective already of its bad writers, fans and critics alike overlooking dodgy science and dodgier politics, cardboard characters and clockwork plots for any old bit of sensawunda.

Now it might just be observer bias, but I’ve always found it was the bad writers who moaned the most about negativity, who are obsessed with remaking science fiction into something positive, a return to some imagined golden age of sf writing. Remic at least is no exception. If the quote above is not bad enough, take a look at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics Project’s blog, which should be a showcase of what Remic and his followers consid good reviews.

I wasn’t impressed. The reviews largely consist of plot summaries combined with meaningless praise as in this review. The writing itself is awful as well, as seen in the following quote. “Williams’ storytelling is stellar throughout this novel. The writing never falters. His ability to paint a picture with words is undeniable. This is a real page turner.“. Not exactly sparkling prose.

To set yourself up as the great saviour of science fiction from the “motherfuckers” who are “systematically ruining” science fiction is obnoxious enough already, but then to fail so miserable at writing readable reviews as well? That’s unforgiveable.