science fiction

You have read more Prometheus award winners than you think

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Time for another meme. The Prometheus Award is one of the weirder science fiction awards in existence. Supposedly given for the best libertarian or libertarian friendly science fiction novel of the year, the award’s jury persist in rewarding Scottish socialists instead — Ken MacLeod won it three times already. Which means he’s got about two once of gold from them, as the award is a solid gold coin — half an ounce until 2001, a full ounce from then. Charlie Stross and Jo Walton are two other unlikely winners (thought they all used to hang out in rec.arts.sf.written. hmmm). In general, if you look at the list below it’s about evenly divided between fairly obvious libertarian or sympathising authors (L. Neil Smith, who actually founded the award for example) and those like Stross, Walton or MacLeod who just happened to write novels with libertarian themes even if not libertarians themselves and even though the political philosophy in these novels isn’t libertarianism either. This openmindedness is the award’s strength as without the more odd winners, it would be a morass of sucky libertarian power fantasies…

Anyway, usual rules apply: bold if I’ve read it, italics if I own it, both for the obvious and strikethroughs for those books I never ever expect to read. (Meme via James.

  • Dani & Eytan Kollin, The Unincorporated Man
  • Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
  • Harry Turtledove, The Gladiator
  • Jo Walton, Ha’penny
  • Charles Stross, Glasshouse
  • Ken MacLeod, Learning the World
  • Neal Stephenson, The System of the World
  • F. Paul Wilson, Sims
  • Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
  • Donald Kingsbury, Psychohistorical Crisis
  • L. Neil Smith, The Forge of the Elders
  • Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
  • John Varley, The Golden Globe
  • Ken MacLeod, The Stone Canal
  • Victor Koman, Kings of the High Frontier
  • Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction
  • Poul Anderson, The Stars are also Fire
  • L. Neil Smith, Pallas
  • James P. Hogan, The Multiplex Man
  • Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, Fallen Angels
  • Michael Flynn, In the Country of the Blind
  • Victor Koman, Solomon’s Knife
  • Brad Linaweaver, Moon of Ice
  • Victor Koman, The Jehovah Contract
  • Vernor Vinge, Marooned in Realtime
  • Victor Milan, Cybernetic Samurai
  • J. Neil Schulman, The Rainbow Cadenza
  • James P. Hogan, Voyage from Yesteryear
  • L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach
  • F. Paul Wilson, Wheels Within Wheels

Yes, basically all the echt-libertarians (as well as Hogan, who was more of a loon) are not authors I ever plan on reading. The Niven, Pournelle and Flynn wankfest only escapes because I read it already when younger and dumber.

Paolo Bacigalupi: threat or menace?

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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Every few years or so a science fiction writer comes along who becomes the darling of the critics, especially mainstream critics deigning to notice the genre, but whose qualities on closer inspection seem to be mostly so much hot air. Stephen Baxter was one of those writers, praised by Locus for his hard science fiction, winning award after award in the nineties, but never doing anything for me. Today it’s Paolo Bacigalupi, praised for his realism and worldbuilding and his non-western settings. His first novel, The Windup Girl just won the Nebula and Locus Awards. All good stuff, right, but why when reading descriptions like the one below and this from a positive review do I feel queasy?

In essence, Emiko has been designed to be a supremely beautiful, compliant geisha. Obedience has been built into her DNA. Her skin has been made ivory smooth by reducing the size of her pores. Never intended to function in a tropical climate, Emiko has nonetheless been callously abandoned in Bangkok: Her patron decided “to upgrade new in Osaka.” She was then bought by the unscrupulous Raleigh, a survivor of “coups and counter-coups, calorie plagues and starvation,” who now “squats like a liver-spotted toad in his Ploenchit ‘club,’ smiling in self-satisfaction as he instructs newly arrived foreigners in the lost arts of pre-Contraction debauch.”

If not out and out racist (and of course, filtered through Michael Dirda’s review), this is orientalist to say the least, delving into the old stereotypes of the Far East and justifying it with genetic mumbo jumbo. It may just be an unfortunate element in this story, but then there’s his traveling through China story in Salon:

I’m not proud of it, but I’m a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie and things are smooth. Every once in a while I don’t just lie to smooth the way, I lie for fun. Once, I told a taxi driver in Beijing that I’d been studying Chinese for a week. This, after having painfully studied the language for four years and lived and worked (and lied) in Beijing for another year. I think I even told him that Chinese was an easy language to learn. Perhaps most people wouldn’t think that’s funny, but it was the only time a Chinese person ever told me my Chinese was very good and really meant it.

My restaurant companion looked at me more closely and asked, “And what do you think of the Chinese people?”

Cold and heartless, but nice if you’re in their clique of friends. “They’re great, too,” I said.

Which makes me go hmmm again. It’s all a bit dodgy even without the genetically engineered elephants powering factories and the huge metal springs serving as batteries…

Who would want to be Harlan Ellison now?

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Harlan Ellison. Harlan Ellison. Some years ago I bought a collection of his work, but didn’t read it right away. By the time I did read it, he had grabbed Connie Willis’s tit when she was the guest of honor at the Hugo Awards. Thus, when I finally read it, every story ended, for me, in “and then he grabbed Connie Willis’s tit at the Hugo Awards.”

“I Have No Mouth but I Must Grab Connie Willis’s Tit.”

— laurenpburka.

Last week the news broke that Harlan Ellison had left the internet, again. Never comfortable with it in the first place, a fairly innoceous post at Io9 drawing attention to his rare books sale drove him over the edge and off the net for the third or forth time this decade. Since HE rarely ventured outside the confines of his stone age website I doubt few beyond the coterie of dedicated fans assembled there would’ve know or cared he was on the net in the first place.

For somebody who was used to having his spats divide fandom this must be awful, but the sad fact is that Ellison has outlived his own fame. His heyday was before Star Wars when science fiction was still small; his best work is three to four decades old, his new work negligible. Anybody who started reading science fiction or entered fandom since 1990 (or even 1980) need never have encountered him, other than through secondhand stories like in the quote above.

Ellison always had an ego and was capable of backing it up as well, but looking back his knack for self promotion made him seem much important than he really was. Objectively he was a good science fiction writer with at least a dozen or so classic stories to his name, responsible for at least one important anthology (Dangerous Visions), while also having some success as a screenwriter for both television and movies, as well as an accomplished essayist. He has had a career he can be proud of, but so have hundreds of other writers. It’s quite possible to be well read in science fiction and never have touched an Ellison story.

Which is the essential tragedy of being Harlan Ellison in 2010. While he has slowly changed from an angry young man into a cranky old geezer, his fans and detractors aged along with him, while new generations of fans and readers never got to know him other than as some old guy with anger management issues.

James P. Hogan 27 June 1941 – 12 July 2010

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Via James Nicoll comes the news that science fiction writer James P. Hogan died yesterday. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. Though he never was a favourite of mine, I did like Inherit the Stars and its first two sequels, yet his descent into kookery and crank science was noticable even then. Embarassing enough that he believed in Immanuel Velikovsky’s theories about the Solar System, which would’ve Venus as a “cosmic egg” birthed by Jupiter whose passage through the Solar System to its current position caused the Biblical plagues in Egypt, worse when he moved on from that relatively innocent belief into disbelieving that HIV causes AIDS, that evolution and climate change are real, but it became truely awful once he got skeptical about the Holocaust as well. He long remained circumspect in stating this skepticism other than to defend the right of various odious rightwingers and nazis to deny the Holocaust, but recent remarks left on his website leave no real doubt about his beliefs:

But when an entire nation is accused of murder on a mass scale, claims that are wildly fantastic, mutually contradictory, and defy common sense and often physical possibility are allowed to stand unchallenged, truth is openly declared to be irrelevant, no evidence for defense is admitted, and even defense attorneys for the accused can be charged and imprisoned as being guilty of the same offense. Need it be said that truth does not need this kind of protection?

Which is why the momentary twinge of sadness I’d normally feel in these circumstances is muted with the relief that at least I don’t have to read about his latest embarassements anymore. I don’t think Hogan actually embraced Holocaust denial out of evil, like those neonazis who are all too willing to celebrate it in private but know it’s good p.r. to disbelieve it in public. Even if not actively evil himself though, his advocacy did help evil, make it easier to pretend Holocaust Denial is a respectable if controversial position to make, that the existence of the Holocaust is something that can be debated rather than historical fact. His stance on other socalled controversies as mentioned above isn’t that innocent either. We’ve seen the damage climate change denial has done to slow down the fight against it and you can image how much damage can be done by denying the link between HIV and AIDS, when you already have widespread folk beliefs helping speed up infection rates e.g. in various African countries.

As such Hogan could function as the poster child for engineer’s disease, a terrible warning for what can happen if intelligent, clever people think they’re much more cleverer than they really are, too clever to believe the “obvious lies of the scientific establishment”. Hogan was trained as a design engineer but quickly moved into sales as his first career, before he started writing science fiction. It’s the perfect background for catching the crackpot bug. Not trained in doing science but rather in enginering, not smart enough or too arrogant to understand his own limitations, clever enough to spot the flaws in pop science stories but again not clever enough to realise that these stories are not the whole truth. It was this misplaced skepticism and overestimation of his own abilities that started innocent enough but led him to some very dark places.

Pushing the envelope only results in papercuts

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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Two comments by Jonathan M. from this thread at Torque Control brutally taken out of context:

I must admit to not understanding a) why one would write stuff that didn’t consciously push the envelope

[…]

I think that ‘pushing the envelope’ is a more useful term than avantgarde simply as a short-hand way of saying “don’t do what other people are doing”. Which is kind of a mantra for the postmodern age.

I always thought the essence of our postmodern age was the realisation that everything had been done and said already and worse, it is all still available at the click of a button, legally or otherwise on the internets. It’s pointless trying to go for the shock of the new, because there is nothing so new as to be shocking anymore; it’s a mug’s game.

New things are not in themselves more interesting than old ideas done well. Nobody will ever be surprised much by a new Terry Pratchett novel, yet I so much rather have him do several more Discworld books than attempting something novel. There’s a pleasure in seeing a familiar concept being done well.