science fiction – Page 53

Evaluating Gollancz’s science fiction gateway

Published on October 13, 2011

So Gollancz finally launched their SF Gateway site after having teased us for months. When they first announced it, I was cautiously optimistic about it. As long as it got the pricing and ease of purchase right and avoided relics from the pre-digital age like territorial restrictions, I could see myself spending a lot of money there. I’m a fairly recent convert to the e-book, liking the ease with which I can carry a small library on my phone, but I still rate physical books higher than their digital counterparts. There are only a few authors I buy in hardcover (Banks, MacLeod, Martin, Miéville, Pratchett, Stross and Walton), more I buy in paperback, but most I buy secondhand. E-books have to compete mainly with the last. They’re certainly not worth buying at hardcover prices and even standard mass market paperback prices is pushing it. Especially for backlisted books.

In short, the books available through the SF Gateway have to be as cheap as buying them secondhand would be. Most of which cost me in the region of two to four euros, being lucky enough to live in a city with loads of cheap, well stocked secondhand bookstores. I’m more than willing to pay roughly the same price or a little bit more for those books I can’t find there, but not much more.

Gollancz got one thing right, from the start offering a wide range of authors and books, but they got it wrong on the other aspects. The first is that you can’t buy the books directly from their site, but are directed to a selection of online booksellers like Amazon. Worse, there’s no pricing information there either. So if I want to buy Pat Cadigan’s Fools, I’m redirected to Amazon, where it costs $8.25. I’m also invited to buy it at Kobo (never heard of it), but that site doesn’t know this book at all!

I could just as well do a search on Amazon UK directly and find the books there, which brings me to the second flaw: the pricing. Here they got it almost right: many of these books are available for three pounds, but there are also quite a few more expensive than that, five pounds and up. Three quid is reasonable; five quid not so much. Annoyingly, most of the books I would like to get are on the expensive side.

Finally, as James Nicoll noted, there are territorial restrictions on these books, while the gender ratio of the authors is a bit skewed…

In conclusion: Gollancz’s experiment is a mixed success. It hasn’t really made it easier or cheaper for me to get these books, but I think I will get at least some of these books at some point. Unless I find them secondhand first of course.

No, we don’t need an unified science fiction award

Published on October 9, 2011

So there’s been a bit of a kerfluffle about the British Fantasy Awards, the organisors being accused if not of devious going-ons than of giving the appearance of same and general incompetence, most fiercly by Stephen Jones, who has previous form for this sort of thing. Long story cut short, as Cheryl Morgan put it, “the person who counted the final ballot was also the winner of one award, the publisher of two other winners, and the partner of the winner of two more” though there is no evidence that there was any fraud going on. Not a good thing for any award, to give the appearance that its administrators are not wholly impartial and it would’ve been better if those had recused themselves.

For Damien G. Walter this however would not be enough. Looking at the three main UK awards, the Clarke, the BSFA and the BFA, he concludes that these should be replaced by one unified award:

Speculative fiction writing is incredibly rich in the UK, but a splintered field of amateur awards is failing to reflect this richness to the outside world. We need a unified award for spec-fic in the UK, that many fan groups contribute to, which is taken seriously by the SF profession, and the larger world of publishing and culture. British SF is fantastic and creative, and we deserve an award that truly reflects that.

Personally I’d think any attempt to try this will have the same outcome as the various attempts to unify the British Trotskyite left; ending up with one more award at the end of it. But more to the point, what’s the use? Why do “we” need to have one award, when the existing awards do very well indeed?

Take a look at the Wikipedia pages for the BSFA and the Clarke awards: both have an excellent track record for recognising the best works published in the UK. Or at least they both agree with my own tastes.

If Damien is correct in arguing that these two awards are not prestigious or well known enough outside of science fiction fandom, what needs doing is to promote them better, if that’s our goal, rather than starting a wholly new award which will face the same struggle anyway. The Clarke award certainly, as Damien acknowledges, already has a certain standing outside of fan circles, which could be build upon. The BSFA award meanwhile already is the voice of fandom, not the whole of fandom certainly, that’s impossible these days, but as open as any award can be without becoming a meaningless online poll. Both awards do the job they need to do most of all, in that they do most years produce winners that can be taken seriously. Therefore we don’t need a new award, they just need to be better at getting the outside world to recognise them.

If that’s what we want to do.

10,000 Light-Years from Home — James Tiptree, Jr.

Published on October 3, 20113 Comments

Cover of 10,000 Light-Years from Home

10,000 Light-Years from Home
James Tiptree, Jr.
255 pages
published in 1973

Ther may have been something ineluctably masculine about James Tiptree Jr’s writing, as Robert Silverberg will never live down writing in his appreciation of Tiptree, but he’s still part of my Year of Reading Women project. Because as we all know now, but Silverberg didn’t, “James Tiptree Jr” was a pseudonym for Alice B. Sheldon. Sheldon’s reasons for chosing a male pseudonym were many and complex and if you want to know all about it, read Julie Phillips James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. Suffice to say that at the time of 10,000 Light-Years from Home, Tiptree’s first collection, the secret was not out yet, as is obvious from Harry Harrison’s introduction, full of what “he” did during the war. All of which was true by the way, just with the genders flipped.

James Tiptree, Jr. therefore was an obvious entry for my little project; the reason I chose this particular collection was just because this was the only one at hand. I’ve read quite a lot of Tiptree stories, as well as several under her other pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon, but mostly through various anthologies rather than her own collections. Because 10,000 Light-Years from Home is such an early collection it misses most of Tiptree’s best stories. Worse, some of her better known early stories, like e.g. “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” or “Your Haploid Heart” are also missing. Yet what remains is still a very good collection of short stories any writer could be proud of. What struck me is that some of the stories in this collection could’ve been published in Analog unaltered, which is not what you’d expect from Tiptree’s reputation as a “difficult”, too feminist, New Wave writer who helped ruined science fiction, as some of the troglodytes online would have it.

The Gabble and Other Stories — Neal Asher

Published on September 23, 2011

Cover of The Gabble and Other Stories

The Gabble and Other Stories
Neal Asher
372 pages
published in 2008

I’m always a bit wary when I start reading a short story collection by a modern science fiction author like Neal Asher, who has made his name writing novels. It’s been decades since the short story was the dominant form of science fiction, so for most modern authors writing them is like doing finger exercises for pianists. Something you do inbetween serious projects. Which can be very unsatisfying for the reader, who sometimes just gets a slab of novel instead of a proper story, or just something slight and inconsequential with no real point to it.

With that in mind I got The Gabble and Other Stories from the library, Neal Asher’s collection of short stories set in his Polity series universe, all written between 2001-2008. Anybody familiar with that series will find more of the same here. Asher’s universe is one of violence, strange alien biotech and body horror, squelchy organics and baroque artificial intelligences, all of which are on display here as in his novels. The main difference between Asher the novel writer and Asher the short story writer is that in the latter he keeps his plots much simpler.A few do suffer from reading as extracts from novels, especially the longest story in the book, Alien Archaeology

Should we worry about science fiction’s denial of climate change?

Published on September 17, 20114 Comments

Mark Charan Newton worries about the cult of science fiction and how this influences the debate on climate change:

There’s so little time to hold back anthropogenic climate change (assuming you accept the unequivocal science in the first place). Leave it too long, and it will be too late to bring back CO2 concentrations to the necessary levels, causing a huge variety of issues that I’ve gone on about many times before. Dreaming up science fiction, Big Ideas, will not address the actual problems of dumping huge amounts of greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere in the first place. Moreover, this SF is diverting attention, political and financial resources away from urgent action. What this also does is play right into the hands of corporate lobbyists who will use it as an argument to delay such urgent action even further, usually to the benefit of [insert polluting organisation here].

I do agree with Mark on his broader point, that it is pointless and counterproductive to look for a quick technofix as the solution to climate change, but worrying about the pernicious influence of science fiction in this is worrying about the tail wagging the dog. Yes, science fiction readers and writers alike are constitutionally more keen on technowizardry as the solution to all our woes than the normal run of the population, but we’re not the ones driving the debate. It’s the ExxonMobil and Philip Morris sponsored think thanks we have to worry about, these are the ones that are fueling the deniers.

In fact, what’s so disappointing about those science fiction writers who are in the denial camp is how much they follow the recieved wisdom there, rather than come up with original ideas of their own. See for example Mark’s criticism of Neal Asher’s ideas about climate change and it’s clear Asher has nothing new to add to the debate. It’s all hockey sticks, cherry picking and (deliberate) misunderstandings of what certain scientists mean with “tricks” in the context of statistical analysis. (I’m glad that Asher for the most part doesn’t feel the need to pollute his fiction with such long debunked nonsense. Love his fiction, don’t agree with his politics on climate change, don’t mind at all if these two are kept separate.)

So unlike Mark, I think most prominent climate change deniers in science fiction like Asher are followers rather than leaders, a symptom rather than the disease. We do need to worry about misplaced faith in technological solutions to climate change so that we don’t remain passive while waiting for a cost free, pain free solution, but science fiction is the wrong place to combat it.