science fiction – Page 72

The Science Fiction Masterworks – how many have you read?

Published on July 7, 20106 Comments

A bunch of lunatics have decided to review all the books in the Gollancz Science Fiction and Fantasy Masterworks series. These series were actually started by the Millennium publishing group about a decade or so ago, but taken over by Gollancz a few years later. Before that it had published its own short series of masterworks, all in the classic yellow Gollancz Science Fiction jacket. (It used to be I could spot any likely sf book in the local library just by looking out for that colour…)

Anyway, this is why there are two list of science fiction masterworks down below. The first list are the original Gollanzc novels, the second list the true Millennium/Gollancz series. It would’ve been a bit much to also add the Fantasy Masterworks, which are another fifty titles or so and which is no longer being added to. As per usual, in bold are the ones I’ve read, italic means I’ve got them in my library and both means the obvious.

I – Dune – Frank Herbert
II – The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
III – The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
IV – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
V – A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
VI – Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
VII – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
VIII – Ringworld – Larry Niven
IX – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
X – The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham

A fairly conservative list of established classics that nobody can have great problems with. Some traditional work from Niven and Heinlein, some British classics from Clarke and Wyndham, some New Wave.

1 – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
2 – I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
3 – Cities in Flight – James Blish
4 – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
5 – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
6 – Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
7 – Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
8 – The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe
9 – Gateway – Frederik Pohl
10 – he Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
11 – Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
12 – Earth Abides – George R. Stewart
13 – Martian Time-Slip – Philip K. Dick
14 – The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
15 – Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
16 – The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
17 – The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard
18 – The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
19 – Emphyrio – Jack Vance
20 – A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
21 – Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
22 – Behold the Man – Michael Moorcock
23 – The Book of Skulls – Robert Silverberg
24 – The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
25 – Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes

Multiple Dicks but only one woman in the first twentyfive books in the series. Much “legacy” science fiction (Wells, Stapledon, Matheson, Stewart) and a tendency towards the more literary end of science fiction, though all established enough to not be controversial. Some strange choices though — why The Book of Skulls as the first Silverberg?

26 – Ubik – Philip K. Dick
27 – Timescape – Gregory Benford
28 – More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
29 – Man Plus – Frederik Pohl
30 – A Case of Conscience – James Blish
31 – The Centauri Device – M. John Harrison
32 – Dr. Bloodmoney – Philip K. Dick
33 – Non-Stop – Brian Aldiss
34 – The Fountains of Paradise – Arthur C. Clarke
35 – Pavane – Keith Roberts
36 – Now Wait for Last Year – Philip K. Dick
37 – Nova – Samuel R. Delany
38 – The First Men in the Moon – H. G. Wells
39 – The City and the Stars – Arthur C. Clarke
40 – Blood Music – Greg Bear
41 – Jem – Frederik Pohl
42 – Bring the Jubilee – Ward Moore
43 – VALIS – Philip K. Dick
44 – The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. Le Guin
45 – The Complete Roderick – John Sladek
46 – Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
47 – The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
48 – Grass – Sheri S. Tepper
49 – A Fall of Moondust – Arthur C. Clarke
50 – Eon – Greg Bear

Two women this time, more Dicks, more Clarke and Wells. The Aldiss entry is again a minor work.

51 – The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
52 – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
53 – The Dancers at the End of Time – Michael Moorcock
54 – The Space Merchants – Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
55 – Time Out of Joint – Philip K. Dick
56 – Downward to the Earth – Robert Silverberg
57 – The Simulacra – Philip K. Dick
58 – The Penultimate Truth – Philip K. Dick
59 – Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
60 – Ringworld – Larry Niven
61 – The Child Garden – Geoff Ryman
62 – Mission of Gravity – Hal Clement
63 – A Maze of Death – Philip K. Dick
64 – Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
65 – Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
66 – Life During Wartime – Lucius Shepard
67 – Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
68 – Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
69 – Dark Benediction – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
70 – Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
71 – Dune – Frank Herbert
72 – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
73 – The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
74 – Inverted World – Christopher Priest
75 – Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
76 – The Island of Dr. Moreau- H.G. Wells
77 – Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
78 – The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
79 – Dhalgren – Samuel R. Delany – (July 2010)
80 – Helliconia – Brian Aldiss – (August 2010)
81 – Food of the Gods – H.G. Wells – (Sept. 2010)
82 – The Body Snatchers – Jack Finney – (Oct. 2010)
83 – The Female Man – Joanna Russ – (Nov. 2010)
84 – Arslan – M.J. Engh – (Dec. 2010)

Three women in the last thirtyfour books of the series. Still not very much and a lots of repeats again in the authors that appear. A bit too conservative in the end, even if every book in the series is worth reading.

Sensawunda

Published on June 27, 2010

Centauri Dreams on the increasingly many brown dwarf stars that are being found in our stellar neighbourhood and how cool they are:

In fact, it gives me pause to reflect that the focaccia I baked the night before last needed higher temperatures (500 degrees Fahrenheit) than the coolest of these brown dwarfs can supply. Most of the new objects in the Spitzer study are T dwarfs, the coolest class of brown dwarfs known, defined as being less than 1500 Kelvin (1226 degrees Celsius). One of the dwarfs in this study is cold enough that it may represent the hypothetical class called Y dwarfs, part of a classification created by a co-author of the paper, Davy Kirkpatrick (Caltech).

Brown dwarfs may be the most common stellar objects around as this representation shows. You wonder if brown dwarfs could have planets and if so, whether those planets could have life on them and if so, how it’s adapted to the extremely cold temperatures such planets must suffer from. Of course, from a hypothetical intelligent species arising on a planet around a brown dwarf, we ourselves would be exotic extremophilic lifeforms: imagine being able to exist at temperatures where water is a liquid!

Mainstream writers and science fiction

Published on June 24, 20103 Comments

Typical. For the second time in a week somebody pulled a post I had set aside to respond to. This time it’s Will Ellwood who got cold feet and deleted his post on whether you can get too old to write science fiction. To be honest, it is an incoherent and rambling post, one of those where you can see the writer isn’t sure themselves what their points are, if any, but if I had to delete all my incoherent posts… Luckily Google remembers everything, because hidden in the jumble was an interesting point:

Often literary writers who have a go at writing what seems to be genre fiction get derided and mocked by genre fans for being unoriginal and clichéd. But are literary writers like Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Cormac McCarthy writing classical SF which is based around the question of ‘what if?’ or are they writing allegories and metaphor about the human condition which use the tools of SF as emphasis?

I would argue that to attempt to critique ‘The Road’ as a traditional post-apocalyptic novel would fail, as the novel is not an example of speculative world building and exploration, but a meditation on many themes. Not least the theme of a relationship between a dying father and his son in hopeless circumstances. To attempt such a critique would be to be genuinely and wilfully interpreting the book wrong.

Ellwood is riffing here on an earlier post by Damien G. Walter on whether or not new science fiction writers need to know their genre history:

But is knowing the history of SF essential to becoming a writer in the genre? On the one hand SF can be considered as an ongoing conversation spanning decades. It you enter that conversation without knowing what has already been said, you are not liable to say much of interest to people who have been following the arguments unfold for decades. But on the other hand if SF is a genre that seeks to find meaning in modern life, raw responses to that life might be mire interesting than viewpoints filtered through the mirror shaded gaze of the SF genre.

Ellwood argues that judging mainstream writers in genre terms when they’re attempting science fiction is missing the point, while Walters finds that it might even work in a writer’s favour to be ignorant of the genre. Both are provocative arguments in a field that has always had a bit of an inferiority complex when comparing itself to the literary mainstream. An inferiority complex fed by the frequent denial of mainstream writers dabbling in science fiction that they do so, of which Margaret Atwood is the most prominent recent examplar. It also galls that so often inferior works of mainstream writers are praised for their originality when so often they’re rote reworkings of old, old science fiction ideas and some never recognised sf writer has done it much better much earlier.

However, it’s not the 1970ties anymore and science fiction, though still routinely portrayed as an activity practised by spotty nerds living in their parents basement, has become ubiqitous, something you can’t help but be aware off, similar to how most people have some understanding of football (be it proper football or the American version) even if not interested in the game. Contemporary writers like David “not the comedian” Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy start with a much greater familiarity with science fiction than earlier writers could have. The science fiction ghetto has long since had its walls torn down and besides which, those walls have always been a lot less high than some sf fans like to believe. Heck, roughly half the writer entries in Clute and Nicholl’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction are from outside the genre.

All of which means both Ellwood and Walters are right, up to a point. It is pointless to judge mainstream writers using science fiction as a tool for not adhering to traditional sfnal strengths like worldbuilding or sense of wonder when that’s not their intent. In Walters’ words, these writers may not be interested in joining the conversation sf as a genre is engaged in. Which is fair enough.

Yet having other priorities does not excuse a writer from getting the science fiction elements right. It is possible to critique The Road on its worldbuilding and unoriginality while still acknowledging its other strengths, to recognise that it stands in a long tradition of post-apocalyptic works, both genre and non-genre. And if people like Michael Chabon — who really should know better — insist that it isn’t science fiction, this should be protested. Science fiction’s own achievements should not be swept under the carpet just because some more literary acceptable writer has taken a shine to the subject. To be fair though, this seems to be more of a critic’s disease, with writers putting on some protective colouring not to be tarred by outdated notions about sf’s illegitimacy by those critics.

If we look at the big picture we may see that science fiction, which had a long prehistory of being proper literature before becoming a real genre in the safety of the pulp ghetto, may migrate back into the literary mainstream again, eventually just becoming one option amongst many for a writer. At the moment it’s almost where the detective story was in the seventies: acceptable for respectable writers to dabble in, as long as they don’t take it too seriously.

Missing the point

Published on June 20, 2010

I’ve got a fair bit of sympathy for people who get annoyed when their culture is misrepresented or appropriated by some science fiction or fantasy writer looking for some exotic colour, but I think Kosin Grigor’s critique of China Miéville’s The City and the City misses the point:

Since we’re hardly lacking in places where people really do practice the kind of mental gymnastics that’s exercised in Besźel/Ul Qoma, the learned knowing of “ours” and “theirs” and never transgressing – though of course not as drastically as to literally unsee The Other Place – it strikes me as gutless to spend so much energy on crafting an allegory (and inevitably leaving it full of holes and failures in this desperate effort of making it Distinct; hell, one of the characters even attended a workshop on policing (real) politically divided cities so that once again we could be assured we’re not reading a roman à clef on any of them) instead of going all the way and writing a fantasy Stolac or what have you, and labelling it clearly as such. Sure, it would piss people off something rotten whichever real divided city one chose to write an alternative history and present reality of, but it’s not like the book isn’t already insulting in its carefree ignorance of its building blocks.

Some of the objections it raises may very well be valid, but it misses the point of the novel. The City and the City is not meant to be a standin for anything, or function as a metaphor for some really existing Eastern or Central European countries. The setting is not quite meant to be realist, rather than evoke just enough of a feeling of realism to serve its central conceit, that of two cities geographically sharing the exact same space yet being separated through the inhabitants of each city deliberately unseeing the other one. The book would not work if it was based on a real situation. I’m sure Kosin Grigor is right to say Miéville made a mess of the language and names and it therefore doesn’t work for them, but again, this is a fictional city we’re talking about, not meant to be representive of anything actually existing. That the language therefore is reminiscent of, but doesn’t quite work like real Eastern/Central European languages is a feature, not a bug.

It’s one thing to be annoyed by this, which I can well understand, but that doesn’t mean that Miéville is guilty of culturefail, as Kosin puts it. Miéville’s cities are not some Ruritania, created to indulge in “Balkans” cliches, but rather use Eastern/Central Europe as an inspiration in the same way that his earlier creation of New Crobuzon.was inspired by London, but not meant to be London. Ultimately everything about Besźel and Ul Qoma is in service to the central idea of unseeing; their existence only needs to make enough sense to support this and to criticise it for not being real enough is missing the point; it was never meant to be.

The goggles do nothing

Published on June 18, 2010

In the past two-three years steampunk has mutated from a science fiction sub-subgenre derived of cyberpunk into something of a lifestyle, taken up by goths looking for something new to be mopey in and hipsters looking for the next ironic thing. It’s been going on for longer of course, but it broke the ‘net’s awareness threshold only recently. In the process steampunk has been stripped of all meaning, as the above Kate Beacon strip refers to, reduced to a series of tropes and fashion accessories. Nothing wrong with playing a bit of dressup, but it has become so ubiqitous now it’s starting to piss people off, as the following heartfelt rant by Philip Reeve shows, already deleted from his website but still in Google’s cache:

No, the problem that I have with Steampunk as a genre is that it’s basically dead. Returning again and again to the same tiny pool of imagery, the writers of Steampunk are doomed to endless repetition. What I used to love about Science Fiction as a teenager was the way that, when you picked up one of those yellow Gollancz SF titles at the library, you had no idea where it would take you; it might be to some dazzling technological future or post-apocalyptic wasteland; it might be to another planet; or it might all be set in the present, just around the corner. But when you pick up a Steampunk book you know pretty much exactly where you’re going; it will take place in an ‘alternate’ nineteenth century which will be neither as complex nor as interesting as the actual nineteenth century. There will be airships; rich villains will be hatching plots involving clockwork and oppressing the workers; rich heroes will see the error of their ways. Most of the characters will not display any of the attitudes or beliefs of the past, but will act and speak like modern people in Victorian fancy dress.

[…]

Steampunk is a genre cul-de-sac: it’s Science Fiction for people who know nothing about science; historical romance for readers whose knowledge of history comes from costume dramas.

I can understand where Reeve is coming from, though he’s stacking the deck somewhat by comparing science fiction with steampunk. If you look at any of science fiction’s subgenres, be it steam or cyberpunk, or planetary romance or space opera or whatever it will seem more limited and codified than the field as a whole, but that’s comparing an entire forest with one of its trees… If you look at the mainstream works within any given (sub)genre, science fictional or otherwise, these works will tend to resemble each other, with the interesting/innovative stuff happening at the borders where genres meet. But there’s nothing wrong with being a well written genre work that does not confound expectations either. What Reeve sees as the problems of steampunk in the first quoted paragraph, are not faults of the genre, but rather of lazy writers taking the set of assembled cliches and not doing much with them. A better writer could take all these cliches and get more out of them.

Reeve is more on the mark in the second paragraph I quoted. He’s echoed by Steampunk Scholar, who is obviously more tolerant of the subculture [1]:

While there are steampunks who have read the original three (Jeter, Powers, and Blaylock), who watched Wild, Wild, West when it had nothing to do with Will Smith or giant steam-spiders, there are those who seem to think that steampunk is the product of the last three years of what I would call the steampunk boom years. Few steampunks read, and even fewer have read early steampunk, or proto-steampunk like Pavane or Nomad of the Time Streams, to say nothing of the handful that have actually read Verne and Wells. So I’m not too surprised when steampunks display an ignorance for the literary origins of the sub-culture.

Steampunk as a literary genre speaks to a weird sort of nostalgia for an era none of its writers or readers have lived through, unlike e.g. sixties nostalgia which is largely driven by baby boomers remembering their childhood. Instead, it’s nostalgia at a remote, based on media recreations of the era like the Disney adaptations of Jules Verne novels or the various movies of Classic Victorian novels. In science fiction it is perhaps as much driven by a nostalgia for earlier eras of science fiction itself, as much as an aesthetic preference for the look and feel of victoriana. It’s no coincidence that the first wave of steampunk novels or steampunk precursors, like the two examples Steampunk Scholar gives, Pavane and Nomad of the Time Streams were written in the late sixties and early seventies, after the New Wave had completely reimaged science fiction. There was something of a nostalgia backlash going on in science fiction then, even amongst those like Moorcock who had been the driving force behind the New Wave. Yet at the same time, how Moorcock (or Harry Harrison in A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurray! amongst others) used steampunk was as much as to criticise the contemporary world around them as much as it was an escape to “a simpler time”. There was a political element to those early works that may well be lacking in contemporary steampunk.

It should not come as a surprise that proto-steampunk or early steampunk is more interesting, more eclectic than those works currently sold as cyberpunk: the same happened with cyberpunk before it and the New Wave before that. It’s the difference between novels written as a singular enterprise and those written within the knowledge and expectations of an already defined genre. And of course genres mutate over the course of their lives; how much does contemporary steampunk still have to do with the examples Steampunk Scholar mentions of earlier works? How much is complaining about people not knowing their history justified and how much is it just yelling at those kids to get off your lawn?

[1] Both posts found via my namesake.