science fiction – Page 54

Slan — A. E. van Vogt

Published on September 16, 2011

Cover of Slan

Slan
A. E. van Vogt
159 pages
published in 1940

“His mother’s hand felt cold, clutching his. Her fear as they walked hurriedly along the street was a quiet, swift pulsation that throbbed from her mind to his. A hundred other thoughts beat against his mind, from the crowds that swarmed by on either side, and from inside the buildings they passed. But only his mother’s thought were clear and coherent–and afraid.”

The opening sentences of Slan show why A. E. van Vogt was the most popular writer of science fiction’s Golden Age, somebody who in 1940 could not only be compared to an Asimov or Heinlein, but compared favourably. Van Vogt had honed his craft on writing “true confession” stories for the pulp market, then got into science fiction with a big bang in John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction with “Black Destroyer” — the story that would decades later inspire the Alien movie. For about a decade or so he was incredibly prolific, inventive and with an almost instinctive understanding of how to push his readers’ buttons, learned while writing sob stories for the romance pulps. All these qualities come together in Slan and if you want to understand van Vogt’s appeal, this is the best novel to try: short, focused and tense.

Slan is the story of Jommy Cross, a mutant, a slan, like all slans stronger and smarter than ordinary humans and equipped with two golden tendrils on his forehead which gives him the ability to read minds — but he’s only nine years old. And he and his mother are caught in the very centre of Centropolis, she sacrifising her own life to enable him to escape from the slan hunters, the secret police that shoots slans on sight, because slans are too dangerous to be allowed to life. Those slans who haven’t been murdered yet have to live in secret, hiding their abilities and their tendrils. Jommy does not know how many of them are still or if he’s the only one, but he knows that he is their last hope, that he has to survive to one day take on the might of the dictator of Earth, Kier Gray, as well as the chief of the secret police, the head slan hunter, John Petty. And then there’s the captive slan girl, Kathleen Layton, subject of a power struggle between the two men…

The Best of C. L. Moore — C. L. Moore

Published on September 13, 2011

Cover of The Best of C. L. Moore

The Best of C. L. Moore
C L. Moore
372 pages
published in 1975

In the mid seventies Ballantine Books, just before it renamed itself into Del Rey, launched a “Best of” series of short story collections by classic science fiction and fantasy authors which I personally think is perhaps the best such series ever produced. Just at a time when science fiction was switching from being a short story, magazine orientated genre to one in which the novel is supreme, here were collections by all the old masters who had made their name in the pulp magazines of the thirties, forties and fifties. The series offered a sense of history to the genre just when science fiction was in danger of losing touch with its roots. It offered both a reminder to old fans of what had attracted them to the genre in the first place and to new fans a sampling of authors they may have thought oldfashioned or perhaps never had the chance to read in the first place.

One of such authors must have been C. L. Moore, who had made her reputation writing science fantasy stories for Weird Tales in the 1930ties. In the 1940ties, after she met and married Henry Kuttner she almost completely stopped writing on her own, instead collaborating with him (often under the Lewis Padgett pseudonym) on a series of classic sf stories, then moving on to writing crime stories and for television, both of which unfortunately paid better, in the late fifties. By the time The Best of C. L. Moore was published it had been the better part of two decades that she had written much new science fiction. Now that more than twice as much time has passed, this collection is still a great introduction to what C. L. Moore had to offer when not collaborating with her husband.

Old Man’s War — John Scalzi

Published on September 11, 2011

Cover of Old Man's War

Old Man’s War
John Scalzi
311 pages
published in 2005

John Scalzi’s debts to Heinlein in Old Man’s War are indeed obvious as he says in his afterword. Even without what looks to be a shootout to the opening scenes of Starship Troopers halfway through the novel it’s pretty obvious where Scalzi got his inspiration from. In structure, plot and protagonist Old Man’s War could fit in neatly with any of Heinlein’s coming of age stories like Space Cadet or The Tunnel in the Sky in which a young man is forced to grow up quickly to confront a hostile universe. The only difference is that John Perry is not a young man, but a seventyfive years old widower when he signs up for his stint with the Colonial Defence Forces.

Apart from that, John fulfills the same role as Rico in Starship Troopers, that of the new recruit who we’ll follow through basis training and combat, somebody who needs to be educated in the true nature of the world he lives in and who can function as a stand in for the reader. Where the two differ is that John obviously is not a callow teenager, but somebody who lived a long and fulfilling life, who saw a chance to regain his youth and took it, without knowing or caring too much about what he’s getting himself into.

Somebody pulled the drama tag…

Published on September 2, 20111 Comment

Cheryl Morgan has a rather strange response to the criticism of this year’s Hugo Awards winners

The reaction to this year’s results, however, has been the worst I can remember. Depressingly much of this has come, not just from outraged fans, but also from professionals in the field. And some of those people, accidentally or otherwise, have said things that can be taken to imply they think the process is corrupt.

[…]

I guess this sort of thing is inevitable. The higher profile a set of awards, the more carping there will be. But I’m tired of having to worry about it. In particular I’m tired of worrying that projects I’m involved in, which I care deeply about, will suffer through their association with whatever mud-slinging is affecting me. And I have to face up to the fact that for a large segment of the community I will never be anything more than a fan who won fan Hugos in controversial circumstances.

So I am bowing out.

Honestly, this all seems a bit over the top, especially the idea that the bogstandard complaints of the Hugos being a popularity contest has anything to do with Cheryl Morgan herself; that’s rating yourself far too highly. In fact, the first time I’ve heard Cheryl Morgan mentioned in the context of Hugo controversies is erm, here. It is of course Cheryl’s right to get away from fandom, but to blame unnamed Hugo bashing critics for her own decision is absurd.

Being less than truthful about what those supposed critics said is not helping either. There’s enough drama in fandom without making more up.

Scalzi is being wrong on the internet

Published on August 31, 20112 Comments

In which I overanalyse some throwaway remarks made by John Scalzi on his blog:

There’s always post-Hugo kvetching, for the same reason there’s pre-Hugo kvetching, which is, people like to kvetch, and/or they have a hard time internalizing that their own tastes are not in fact an objective standard of quality. I do think there’s a core of commenters whose problem internalizing that other people have other tastes is overlaid with a more-than-mild contempt for fandom, i.e., “Oh, fandom. You’ve shown again why you can’t be trusted to pick awards, you smelly, chunky people of common tastes, you.” Fandom does what fandom does with folks like that: it ignores them, which I think is generally the correct response to such wholly unwarranted condescension.

Apart from the slight defensiveness, which Damien Walter also noted, the mistake made here is to believe the Hugo Award voters equalise fandom. Once upon a time this was true, but that time is at least four decades ago. Even within print sf, there no longer is fandom, there are fandoms. The Hugo Awards and the Worldcon are the legacy of the arguably oldest still existing strand of fandom, but cannot be said to represent fandom as a whole. Hence the criticism aimed at the Hugos in general and this years abysmal winner(s) in particular is not that of outsiders condemning fandom, but an argument within fandom itself.

And the real problem with the Hugos is not that the voters have inferior tastes, or even so much that they keep rewarding the wrong books or people, but that they’re still seen as representative for the tastes of the whole of fandom, rather than a smallish subset of fandom. You could see that very well with this year’s Hugos, where the tastes of “online fandom” (or a sizeable subset of it anyway) differed so much from what the Hugo voters in the end awarded. Not just with the Best Novel Hugo, but also with the Best Fan award — which would’ve probably gone to James Nicoll if online fandom had had its say.

But no other subset of fandom has such a prestige outside of fandom as the Hugo voters do, as the Hugo Award is one of the two science fiction/fantasy awards well know to sf&f readers and other “civilians”. If the general taste of the Hugo voters is mediocre it reflects on science fiction and fantasy fandom as a whole, in a way e.g. the Clarke Awards do not. And since it’s only a small and distinct group of people voting on the Hugos, chances are they’ll get it wrong…