Fantastika

Penguins, science fiction and modern art

science fiction
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via Torque control comes The Art of Penguin Science Fiction, whose raison d’etre is as follows:

This curious linkage of modern art and sf is at the heart of this website, and is made all the more intriguing by the subtle and often ingenious connections between the artworks and the stories within. Following on from this, Penguin continued to publish sf as a number of mini-series, with covers that reveal the influence of Pop Art and to some extent Op Art. But to put these later developments in perspective it is necessary to go back to the first sf titles that Penguin published in the 1930s, for these early covers, now celebrated on a stamp, have come to be regarded as artworks in their own right.

I have a hunch that having science fiction in Penguin editions, especially once the modern art covers started to show up, has done a lot to enhance the respectability of the genre in the UK. To this day any sort of abstract arty looking cover has me looking to see if it’s science fiction. The sort of science fiction that was available behind those covers — Ballard, Aldiss, Moorcock, Vonnegut undsoweiter — also fits in well with that whole post-war modernism that went on at the same time.

Until recently the history of Penguin sf and its cover art has been largely overlooked. This website, along with a series of articles on the subject, attempts to rectify this. But what the articles convey with words this website does with images, and thereby offers what words cannot: over 150 Penguin sf covers, and the ability to trace their evolution at the click of a button, as titles were reprinted and different covers came and went. As such this website complements the articles, which focus more on the science fiction and its linkage to each book’s cover art. Here, however, it is the covers themselves that light the way along the multiple paths that weave through the history, and art, of Penguin sf.

Which also makes for a nice parlour game: look to see how many of those Penguins you have on your bookshelves yourself. There are a lot of science fiction fans who collect publishers as much as they do writers; about the only one I could see myself do that with would be Penguin (and perhaps the old DAW imprint).

Swine flu

geekdom, science fiction, sciencebollocks
Published on 4 Comments on Swine flu

I was somewhat surprised at the wall to wall hysteria about that outbreak of swine flu on display in the free newspapers here this morning. SARS and bird flu has us primed for worry about any novel flu epidemic, but is there really any reason to get so panicky about it? Especially when so far there haven’t been any Dutch cases whatsoever, nor all that many in Europe. So much tosh is talked about these “pandemics”, when the death rates even in Mexico are barely hitting three figures. It’s just embarassing how quickly we get paniced by these stories.

Some people may have ulterior motives for getting all het up about swine flu though, a certain kind of science fiction fan for example. Let Dr Elmo explain:

It is anthropologically interesting that SF fans are among the most eager hand-wringers. I think this is probably because it’s the kind of thing that allows an SF fan to demonstrate how Heinleinian they are–how prepared they are, how authoritative their flu kit is, how they reduce their chance of catching it, how exemplary is their (self!) treatment when they do catch it, compared to the mundanes, who are ignorant and incompetent.

Lovery links

Comix, fantasy, science fiction
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A Game of Thrones to be filmed for tv …in Belfast? Cue dry as dust press release:

First Minister Peter D Robinson MP MLA and deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness MP MLA, have confirmed that HBO, the USA’s leading pay cable network, will film a TV pilot in Northern Ireland this year.

‘A Game of Thrones’, is scheduled to arrive in the third quarter of 2009 and is set to be an epic project. It is expected that the production will utilise various locations, as well as build a massive set in the Paint Hall.

Mr Robinson said: “This is the first time that a TV production of such vast size and scale has been filmed in Northern Ireland. The announcement comes following the visit by the deputy first Minister and I to Los Angeles in March. It will be a welcome boost to the production sector, helping develop the industry here and bringing employment and investment to Northern Ireland.

(Incidently, Paul Cornell, amongst others, is going to write for Martin’s Wild Cards series.

Samuel Delany on racism and science fiction:

Since I began to publish in 1962, I have often been asked, by people of all colors, what my experience of racial prejudice in the science fiction field has been. Has it been nonexistent? By no means: It was definitely there. A child of the political protests of the ’50s and ’60s, I’ve frequently said to people who asked that question: As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.

How to teach historical context via a single comic; that is, Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.

Factor in the photorealistic gestures and that can only be the Batsuit of the 21st Century. But why did folks at DC decide to go with the throwback costume at the dawn of a new century? Nostalgia? What happened in 2000 that made the less cartoonish Batsuit more attractive to fans of the book? Because the subtraction of the shield was not the only change: the greys now skew black, the blues shift black-navy, and the yellow of the utility belt pales to a washed and muted gold.

J. G. Ballard has died

"Literature", Auntie Beeb, science fiction
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This is how the BBC broke the news: “the author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness“. No mention whatsoever in the rest of the article that he was actually a science fiction writer and made his reputation doing exactly that. The obituary is the same, calling him “surrealistic” and as “fusing external landscapes of futuristic visions with the internal workings of his characters’ minds”. Hell, whoever wrote it didn’t even know what his first novel was: the article thinks it’s The Drowned World (1962) while it’s in fact The Wind from Nowhere (1961).

It’s the sort of lazy biography you see a lot with science fiction writers who broke out of the ghetto, where their earlier works are de-emphasised, seen as unimportant youthful mistakes or at best stepping stones to their real work. We’ve seen it with Philip K. Dick and William Gibson as well.

It annoys the fuck out of me, not so much out of some tribal loyalty to science fiction, but because you just cannot judge his later, more “mainstream” novels without knowing his earlier work. There’s a logical progression in his work going all the way back to his earliest short stories to his last novel. Ballard always was a perfect modernist “post-modernist” writer, growing up in the legacy of twentieth century modernism and dissatisfied with what it had brought, reveling in the onset of entropy bringing down its works. Whether it’s the lush tropical primeval jungle invading luxuery hotels in The Drowned Word or the anarchy depicted in High-Rise taking that symbol of post-war modernist architecture, the tower block, the images remain the same: stark, concrete forms smothered in chaotic but natural shapes. Take his more mainstream work out of this context and it loses its value.

UPDATE: David Pringle’s obituary in the Guardian is quite good, explaining why his science fiction is important as well as his evolution as a writer movign away from it. Pringle’s prediction that Empire of the Sun “is likely to be the book upon which much of his reputation will rest” is mildly depressing, especially since much of the attention paid to it stems from the fact it was made into a Spielberg movie. It’s nowhere near Ballard’s best work, though it does provide some insight in where he found certain of the images that crop up in his other work. Personally I find everything after his seventies work to be of less value.