Asteroid discovery from 1980 to 2010. Science fiction promised us a future in which a few brave men in small tin cans would have to go out and discover each one of them separately at great risk; instead it turns out high powered and not so high powered telescopes, lots of computers and the occasional unmanned probe are enough to discovered hundred of thousands of new asteroids in a few years…. A great age for scientific discovery, but not so heroic as we thought it should be…
science fiction
Books read August
Eight books read this month, which is a respectable score but not spectacular. Theme this month was war and science fiction, as you will see.
The battle of Kursk — David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House
A recentish history of the famous tank battle, making full use of the opening of Soviet state archives since the end of the Cold War.
Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory — Adrian R. Lewis
At first I thought the author had it in for the British — some American WWII historians do have a chip on their soldier about the way the UK treated the American contribution to the struggle in Europe after all — but in the end it turned out he had a much more valid case to make. What Lewis attempts to do here is to argue that the strategy and tactics developed for the Normandy landing were flawed both in conception and execution, with the methods developed in earlier landings in the Pacific and Italy ignored. I’m not sure how much I should believe him, but it’s a well made argument.
First Among Sequels — Jasper Fforde
Thursday Next is back in the first of a new series. If you like Fforde and Thursday Next, you’ll like this one as much as the earlier books in the series. Fun but slight.
Shades of Grey — Jasper Fforde
Much more ambitious is this book, in which Fforde takes his considerable inventioness and creates something more than just a cheap laugh. In a Britain of after the end everything revolves around colour, as in who can see red colours, or green colours, or yellow and how well you see a specific colour range determines your place in society. A classic sort of coming of age story in which the young hero discovers what his world is really like, it reminded me somewhat of John Christopher’s White Mountain series.
Hitler’s Empire — Mark Mazower
An indepth look at the economic realities of Nazi occupied Europe and how the nazi ideals were in conflict with the need to win the war. It’s a great book on a horrible but fascinating subject, looking at all aspects of the nazi economy, including the Holocaust.
The Dragon Never Sleeps — Glen Cook
Great space opera by an author best known for his dark fantasy, which does share some of the feeling of his fantasy works. I got this as a gift for my birthday, as well as the next book and it’s been great.
Passage at Arms — Glen Cook
Das Boot in space. ‘Nuff said. Very well done.
Spin — Robert Charles Wilson
Suddenly, without any fuzz, the stars went out, as something slid between them and the Earth. And then it turns out that while days go by down below, in the rest of the universe millions of years are passing… Apart from some slight niggles, an excellent grand scale science fiction novel.
Science fiction has a lot to answer for
Brad Reed reports on libertarian transhumanism in which internet blowhard and proud government sponsored individualist Glenn Reynolds features prominently:
Writing over at the Cato Institute, meanwhile, mortal non-cyborg law professor Glenn Reynolds acknowledges that the creation of godlike robo-humans might have negative consequences for both the environment and the poor souls who choose to remain in their current flesh-bag forms.
“The empowerment of ordinary people is a good thing, but it also carries with it the dangers inherent in empowering bad people,” he writes. “In a world in which individuals have the powers formerly enjoyed by nation-states, an already-shrinking planet can get pretty small.”
So how does Reynolds propose to remedy this? Does he think maybe we should make it illegal to inject the screaming hobo at the local 7-11 with matter-creating nanobots? Why, no! He thinks we should resign ourselves to the fact that the Earth is doomed and instead work on blasting off into space before we all die, since “humanity won’t survive the next thousand years unless we colonize space.”
Reynolds elaborates on this theme in an essay for Popular Mechanics, going into greater detail about the dangers the Singularity could pose for humanity. Among them: nanobots that emit mind-control drugs, computer worms that infect and kill our new robobrains, and even the possibility of putting “world-killer weapons into the hands of anyone having a bad-hair day.” Reynolds admits these things might be potentially bad, but he thinks we ought to go through with them anyway since the free market will naturally create a demand for remedies to nanobot-enhanced cocaine addicts that can fire cruise missiles from their fingers.
As Reed says, transhumanism, with its emphasis on how individuals could become superhuman is the perfect fit for the type of childish rightwing libertarianism practised by the likes of Kurtzweil and Reynold, a way to evade all your obligations to society forever. It’s sadly not a new or even uncommon strain in sf fandom — from the start there have always been people who genuinely thought fans were slans, better than normal people and who swanted to remove themselves from the common herd. Even in the infancy of science fiction in the forties there were nutters like Claude Degler who wanted to create a master race of fans by getting them to breed in his special lovecamp in the Ozarks.
But the real coupling of science fiction with of rightwing libertarian science fiction only took place from the seventies and can probably be blamed on one guy: Jerry Pournelle. If you’ve read his and Larry Niven’s Footfall, where you have a team of thinly disguised science fiction writers (Pournelle and friends basically) advicing the US president during an alien invasion, that’s more or less how he would like things to be in real life. A product of Boeing as much as of Analog, Pournelle was the seventies version of Glenn Reynolds, arguing for space colonisation as essential to America’s defence and the future of the human race. He was thick with the Team B loonies, the same sort of people who three decades later would rage about the Islamist threat but where then predicting a Soviet victory in the coming Third World War, less than a decade before the USSR collapsed…
Pournelle then established this political tradition of which Reynolds is the latest example, a tradition that mixes personal greed with a technocratic vision of the future and a deep dislike of having to deal with other people… L5 colonies for the best and brightest were the answer in the seventies, brain downloads today.
Reaching for the blowhard gun
Heinlein was a blowhard, an asshole even, who again and again in his stories presented his own opinions as laws of nature. More writers do that of course, but Heinlein had the knack of saying dumb things intelligently, of selling you bullshit in a way that makes you believe in it at least for the length of the story. This is not a negative quality: his skill as a bullshit artist is what made his futures so believable: of course we will have moving roads in the future, of course the Moon needs to be free, of course it makes sense for government to be only open to veterans, of course the door dilates. He was a sharp observer, the master of the small, telling detail, always confident in the story he was telling, even when he was wrong and knew he was wrong. He didn’t always succeed of course — in his later novels especially the bullshit is piled too deep to ignore. Some people might like the smell of cowpats off in the distance, but nobody wants to live next to a pig farm. But at his best his natural charm and sense of story made the patties go down a treat.
Which is why it’s so annoying that his fans are all so quick to emulate the blowhard rather than the storyteller. too often when confronted any criticism of Heinlein, no matter how justified (and especially when it’s coming from outsiders) Heinlein fans “reach for the blowhard gun”, in Carlos’ memorable phrase. Some of this was on display in the comment thread to Jo Walton’s post about the new Heinlein biography, where she said she couldn’t trust it on the details of Heinlein’s life because of several small errors in things she did know about. It didn’t quite get into the usual character assassinations and contrived arguments in why some obvious Heinlein error isn’t actually (cf. every discussion on Heinlein’s understanding of relativity ever) and in fact even became interesting in the end. But following that, one Sarah Hoydt, science fiction author and Heinlein fan felt the need to stir the shit.
First post: “I’ve been on a dozen or two Heinlein panels at cons, and it always devolves to name calling. I will admit I am far from an unbiased observer, but hearing someone call Heinlein a racist or a sexist offends me.” followed by “ Part of this is the blindness of those who–with blythe certainty and missionary zeal–undertake to tally the color of characters’ skin and the thoughts of every female character in Heinlein’s books.”
Second post: “Right. Predictably, on cue, as on every panel about SFF, if you mention the words “Heinlein” and “women” in the same sentence or even in the same page, you attract screaming, ranting and accusations that Heinlein and by extension yourself cook babies for breakfast or perhaps eat them live on camera.” Also: “Okay—if everyone is done screaming, may we now speak as adults discussing adult problems?“.
As you can see, she has the blowhard part of Heinlein down pat, but the charm and conviction are missing. When Heinlein demolished a strawman he made sure it could actually stand on its own before knocking it down. Hoydt on the .other hand thinks all she needs is to call the opponents in her head names before demonstrating her own tawdry clich^W^Wdeep insights. You can see better ranting at fifth rate wingnut blogs and Heinlein would turn in his grave reading this drivel.
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award is intended to showcase once important but largely forgotten science fiction/fantasy writers, who’ve often slipped out of print. Since its inception in 2001 it has shown an excellent taste, building up a list of great writers, but there’s something different about this year’s winner. Let’s see, shall we? Since 2001 the following writers have won the award:
- Olaf Stapledon, 2001: writing outside genre science fiction as a worthy heir to H. G. Wells, novels like Last and First MEn and especially Starmaker were truly cosmic in scale showing how science fiction could escape the petty concerns of everyday life and show how insignificant we really are in the universe, creating an almost religious sense of wonder.
- R.A. Lafferty, 2002: cynical, sarcastic, the sharpest wit in science fiction, fond of wordplay but never turning it into punishment, his stories always had a strong moral centre even if it was not always easy to find out exactly which moral centre. Nobody wrote like him before him, nobody writes like him now.
- Edgar Pangborn, 2003: one of the most humane science fiction writers, showing how science fiction could hold up a mirror to observers, that it could focus on people as well as on gadgets.
- Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, 2004: both were great writers on their own, but together they were also one of the great writing partnerships, in which even they themselves could often not tell who had written which story. C. L. Moore was almost as good a writer of planetary adventures as Leigh Brackett, as well as the creator of one of the great fantasy heroes, Jirel of Joiry, a redheaded warrior popular decades before Roy Thomas would resurrect an obscure Robert E. Howard character as Red Sonja. Kuttner specialised in humourous fantasy and science fiction stories, helping create a truly American fantasy tradition in the spirit of the old European fairy tales.
- Leigh Brackett, 2005: the best of the heirs of Edgar Rice Burroughs, better even than the man himself, unsurpassed when it comes ot proper planetary romance and science fantasy, as well as the writer for the best Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back
- William Hope Hodgson, 2006: Edwardian writer of horror, ghost stories and fantasy, still very readable today, his best works The House on the Borderland and The Night Land still impressing modern writers like China Miéville.
- Daniel F. Galouye, 2007: who wrote a handful of novels, one of which formed the basis of both a seventies German television series directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the 1999 movie The Thirteenth Floor
- Stanley G. Weinbaum, 2008: died much too young of a particularly nasty cancer but still managed to be the first writer to create truly alien aliens, back in the 1930ties.
- A. Merritt, 2009: a pulp writer of horror and fantasy, massively popular before World War II with multiple movie adaptations of his stories, a friend and influence on H. P. Lovecraft.
- Mark Clifton, 2010: co-writer of the worst novel ever to win the Hugo Award.
One of those winners is not like the others… Clifton might not be the worst science fiction writer ever, but does he really need to be rediscovered? Where is the Lionel Fanthorpe Reobscurity Award when you need it?
(via James.)