science fiction

Paolo Bacigalupi: threat or menace?

Published on July 18, 2010

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?

Published on July 15, 20105 Comments

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

Published on July 13, 20105 Comments

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

Published on July 9, 2010

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.

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.