science fiction

We Who Are About To… — Joanna Russ

Published on July 1, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of We Who Are About To...

We Who Are About To…
Joanna Russ
170 pages
published in 1975

We Who Are About To… is arguably Joanna Russ’ most famous and controversial novel after The Female Man. That novel became famous because of its outspoken feminism, still rare in science fiction at the time; if we’re honest, still somewhat rare today. We Who Are About To… comitted a greater sin however, by attacking the optimistic, can do attitude of classic science fiction, the belief that any adversity can be overcome by man’s unique fighting spirit. It’s not just that the protagonist doesn’t win in the end; even Asimov the arch-optimist had written “Founding Father” ten years earlier, a story in which four astronauts fight but fail to terraform a planet before it kills them. No, the real problem is that she rejects the choice out of hand and choses not to fight, not even to try.

That of course went against the grain, with plenty of science fiction fans being outraged about it, if I can believe the contemporary fan publications. But We Who Are About To… is about more than just rejecting science fiction’s traditional morality, it’s also a novel about how die. Slightly over half way through the story the central conflict of whether or not to fight has already been resolved, in favour of not to. The rest of the story is all about how you die. This part of the book has received less attention than the first half.

Alternative 3

Published on June 20, 2012Leave a comment

I’ve heard of this, but never seen it, but the internet remembers everything: Alternative 3, the classic doomsday mockumentary about how the British braindrain to the US is actually part of a plan to colonise the Moon and Mars as the Earth becomes uninhabitable through pollution.

(Via MetaFilter.)

Ray Bradbury

Published on June 9, 2012Leave a comment

I’ve thought more about Ray Bradbury this past week than I’ve done for years. Bradbury was a writer I read quite a lot from when I was a child first discovering science fiction, through short story collections like R Is for Rocket. Judging from the various online obituary and remembrance threads I’ve seen, I’m not the only one for whom he was important in kickstarting their sf interest.

Which is fitting, as Bradbury is of course the writer who first put childhood into science fiction. He made small town, white picket fenced America seem as exciting and glamourous as outer space, while making all the paraphernalia of science fiction (rockets and Mars and aliens) a familiar part of everyday sububurban life. Like Roald Dahl he was great at telling adult stories for children, matter of fact if slightly patronising at times.

What set him apart from other science fiction writers was the strong nostalgia that drenched his work; not that others don’t indulge in nostalgia sometimes, but with Bradbury it was a full time pre-occupation. At heart, Bradbury was a reactionary writer and nostalgia was how he channeled it. Remember a few years ago when a rare interview revealed him as a cranky, bitter Fox News watching old man? That couldn’t have been a surprise to anybody who took a close look at his fiction. In almost every story there’s this hankering for a barely remembered, never existed golden past, when America was innocent and every summer a golden one, before progress ruined everything. He never believed in science and progress as other sf writers did; it almost always ended up in tears in his work (the automated house still going after the nuclear holocaust) or at the cost of our humanity, as in that story where the first astronauts on Mars burn the last few existing novels in the world.

Luckily, while his personal polical opinions might have been nasty, this reactionary, nostalgic streak in his fiction just helped created some of the best American fabulation ever written.

Intrusion — Ken MacLeod

Published on June 6, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Intrusion

Intrusion
Ken MacLeod
387 pages
published in 2012

Over the past five years Ken Macleod has written a series of standalone novels that each in their own way have dealt with the post-9/11, post-War on Iraq 21st century and what it might evolve into. Intrusion is the latest in this series. Where MacLeod had always been a politically minded writer, his last few novels (The Execution Channel, The Night Sessions and The Restoration Game) were all directly rooted in current political realities, especially the socalled War on Terror. Intrusion continues this trend, but this time swapping the War on Terror with the nanny state.

And at first Intrusion feels like a novel from an alternate universe, one in which Labour didn’t lose the elections and had continued on its pre-9/11 social engineering course rather than by distracted by Blair’s foreign crusades. Britain’s nanny state has been turned up to eleven, driven by ubiquitous realtime surveillance and monitoring technology and increasingly finetuned social law. MacLeod has taken everything New Labour and the ConDem coalition have been guilty off in the past decade and a half regarding tackling socalled social problems: increasingly absurd health and safety laws, the liability adverse local bureaucracies, the enthusiasm to seek technofixes for ingrained social problems, the idea that you can force or nudge people into healthier lifestyles through banning or taxing their vices and extrapolated what it would look like a generation or so into the future. It’s a world in which most women wear monitor rings to make sure they’re not pregnant and if they are, are not smoking or drinking or going to places where toxins might be that could harm their unborn child, where ipso facto most women work at home as so many workplaces are not safe for their (potential) offspring due to e.g. trace remnants of cigarette smoke.

Jack and Jack, Kirby and Vance

Published on May 30, 2012Leave a comment

cover of the Moon Moth comics adaptation

Tom Spurgeon recommends the comics adaptation of Jack Vance’s short story The Moon Moth

This has to be the oddest stand-alone science fiction comic I’ve read in years. While I can’t tell yet how good it is, it was certainly memorable and I encourage those of you that like such things — and as much as the new science fiction-oriented Image stuff is on everyone’s minds I’m thinking that’s a lot of you — pick this one up and take a look. Jack Vance has an almost Kirby-sized issue with neglect in terms of his influence and the ubiquity of his approach.

Interesting to compare Vance to Kirby, where I can sort of see what Tom means as both were incredibly influential on their own terms and somewhat neglected now, though I do think Vance does not quite have the stature in science fiction that Kirby has in comics, if only because the field is more contested. The true difference between the two is of course that Vance got to keep the copyright and trademarks for all his stories and Kirby could not, which means that we did get a fan driven Vance Integral Edition, but not a Kirby equivalent.