science fiction – Page 81

Myth Conceptions

Published on May 19, 2009

In an otherwise standard post about the misguided longing of readers for an imagined Golden Age of book publishing, Robert McCrum

Myth Three: In the good old days, books were longer, and more demanding. Today, given the minuscule attention span of the Twitter Age, the classics of yesteryear will inevitably slip off the modern reader’s radar. This is simply not true. For every mammoth Dickens or Henry James (and yes, there are plenty of those), there were also miracles of brevity. The Great Gatsby is barely 60,000 words long. Most Graham Greene novels come in at about 220 pages; Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is barely 175 pages in my edition. With the exception of 1984, George Orwell rarely wrote more than 250 pages. Michael Ondaatje’s brilliant first book, Running in the Family, is scarcely 180 pages; Elizabeth Taylor’s marvellous novel The Wedding Group just 230 pages. And so on.

What’s interesting is that this supposedly common “myth conception” (thank you Robert Asprin!) is the direct inverse of a common complaint of older science fiction readers. Hang out at any sf blog or forum and sooner or later you’ll hear some old fart complaining about how nobody writes short books anymore like they did in the Golden Age when a novel had a good idea, great characters and a proper plot and only needed 150 pages to do so! Readers who sample these classics without the benefit of nostalgia will quickly notice how shallow most of them actually were, with cardboard characters and barely developed plots, but that never stopped the old farts. One wonders what the current science fiction and fantasy reader, having grown up with fat fantasy bricks and 700 page space operas will moan about in thirty years….

Comment of the Day: Blasphemy!

Published on May 14, 2009

James Nicoll:

I hear when Christ returns, he will be bearing a copy of [Duke Nukem Forever] in one hand and a copy of Final Dangerous Visions in the other.

He’s wrong of course, it’ll be Last Dangerous Visions. Also:

The Bible with a creator’s commentary track would be interesting.

“OK, what you have to understand about this next section is that I gave Moses a map, a compass and a set of directions, all of which he managed to leave on his dresser back in Egypt. Then he blamed Me because he wouldn’t admit he was lost for the next forty years.”

Both quotes coming from a typically freewheeling conversation sparked by Neil Gaiman’s somewhat overwrought’s George R.R. Martin is not your bitch post. Fanboy entitlement can be scary, but the view of the writer as artiste dishing out goods to the grateful plebs from on high isn’t nice either.

Oh No Lois Bujold No!

Published on May 12, 2009

There’s a lot of wisdom in the old saws that readers should not meet the writers of their favourite books nor writers respond to criticism, as has been proven once again by what started as an enthusiastic review on the Tor website when Jo Walton shared why she like Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Child. The trouble is, Thirteenth Child, as Jo puts it takes place in “an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.”

Which may very well be an interesting setup for a story, but quite understandably rubbed quite a few people the wrong way as a story that has magicked away the native inhabitants of America to make way for the happy guilt free adventures of white folk. Patricia Wrede may have used this idea in all innocence, but as a writer in a country that has been founded on the murder of its original inhabitants and which has a long tradition of ignoring and silencing the voices of the survivors, of denying there was a history before the Pilgrim Fathers, that’s not enough. In the end the Thirteenth Child still fits neatly in this tradition of denial and for many people, including myself, this is enough to dismiss it without reading.

As you might expect, once the first few people expressed their discomfort with the premise of this novel, you got the usual debate between them and those who saw little if any problem with it. For many people a story’s just a story and any attempts to “politicise” it is scary or wrong. In short, we got Racefail II: the Quickening. All of which wouldn’t be so bad but then Lois Bujold showed up and well, made a fool of herself…

First she told people to just read the book, then she accused people of wanting “a sermon” as well as having made up their mind. Her next post was the worst though, patting herself on the back for doing something to improve the world while saying her critics just talked. Things went worse from there…

I’m sure Lois Bujold only jumped in to defend a friend from being, as she saw it, unfairly slandered, but unfortunately the way she went about it only confirmed the worst suspicions of people already suspicious of white sf/fantasy writers due to the huge clusterfuck that was Racefail 2009. The discussion about Thirteenth Child isn’t really about the book or its writer, but about a pattern in fantasy and science fiction that excludes people of colour, whether unconsciously or otherwise. To deny or belittle this as Bujold did doesn’t help. So yeah, she didn’t do herself or Wrede much good jumping in and I like her slightly less for it.

Perhaps the most unhelpful suggestion in this discussion was the idea that people need to “read the book” before they can criticise it. I’ll end this post with Bruce Baugh explaining why:

But that makes me quite an outlier in the hardcore of fandom. Boasts about the size of unread-book stacks remain ubiquitous, the subject of amused consideration. And yet people who take a self-deprecating pride in all the books they’re not reading keep insisting that others who decline to read this book here are clearly being cowards and wimps or the slaves of political correctness, because otherwise of course they’d be reading this one and never mind their own tastes and judgments.

I am not impressed. At least not favorably.

The fact is that we do all make our selections, and so nearly as I know nobody actually reads purely and only the works they believe are most meritorious by some general standard. We skip classics for the current fad; we read for comfort, and cheap thrills, and prurient curiosity, and lots of other reasons. And you know, this is all quite okay, because as a species we can’t run in top mental gear all the time. People who are stuck unable to take mental vacations succumb to a variety of physical and psychological impairments, and doing things that make rest (mental as well as physical) impossible is torture.

Imperial Earth – Arthur C. Clarke

Published on May 4, 2009

Cover of Imperial Earth

Imperial Earth
Arthur C. Clarke
305 pages
published in 1976

The last Arthur C. Clarke book I’ve read was Rendezvous with Rama back in 2002; unfortunately it was the news of his death that brought me to read another, as a private homage. I had read Imperial Earth before, in Dutch, as Machtige Aarde and liked it, though it never became a favourite. It seemed a good idea to reread this rather than one of the more obvious classic Clarke novels, to get a good idea of the strengths of Clarke’s later works. Imperial Earth was written and published in 1976 and set three hundred years later, at the United States’ quincentennial, which to be honest immediately dates it for me. On the other hand it is refreshing to read a sf novel that has the US still existing three hundred years in the future, rather than as subsumed into a world government or fallen apart into a Balkanised mess. At the very least setting the book at the quincentennial signals how much of a seventies book this is.

Imperial Earth starts on Titan where despite the harsh circumstances a flourishing colony has been established, which makes its living supplying hydrogen for interplanetary fusion rockets as the only place in the Solar System where hydrogen was abundant enough to be worthwhile to harvest and gravity light enough to be able to do it cheaply. It was through the drive and will of one man, Malcolm Makenzie, that the Titan colony became a reality and he and his family have ruled it since. That same drive meant that when it became clear he suffered from too much gene damage due to space travel to produce children the normal way, he instead let himself be cloned on Earth. His son did the same and Duncan Makenzie is the second generation of Makenzies to be born this way, now old enough to do the same himself and fortuitiously invited to the quincentennial celebrations of the birth of America.

Penguins, science fiction and modern art

Published on April 29, 2009

via Torque control comes The Art of Penguin Science Fiction, whose raison d’etre is as follows:

This curious linkage of modern art and sf is at the heart of this website, and is made all the more intriguing by the subtle and often ingenious connections between the artworks and the stories within. Following on from this, Penguin continued to publish sf as a number of mini-series, with covers that reveal the influence of Pop Art and to some extent Op Art. But to put these later developments in perspective it is necessary to go back to the first sf titles that Penguin published in the 1930s, for these early covers, now celebrated on a stamp, have come to be regarded as artworks in their own right.

I have a hunch that having science fiction in Penguin editions, especially once the modern art covers started to show up, has done a lot to enhance the respectability of the genre in the UK. To this day any sort of abstract arty looking cover has me looking to see if it’s science fiction. The sort of science fiction that was available behind those covers — Ballard, Aldiss, Moorcock, Vonnegut undsoweiter — also fits in well with that whole post-war modernism that went on at the same time.

Until recently the history of Penguin sf and its cover art has been largely overlooked. This website, along with a series of articles on the subject, attempts to rectify this. But what the articles convey with words this website does with images, and thereby offers what words cannot: over 150 Penguin sf covers, and the ability to trace their evolution at the click of a button, as titles were reprinted and different covers came and went. As such this website complements the articles, which focus more on the science fiction and its linkage to each book’s cover art. Here, however, it is the covers themselves that light the way along the multiple paths that weave through the history, and art, of Penguin sf.

Which also makes for a nice parlour game: look to see how many of those Penguins you have on your bookshelves yourself. There are a lot of science fiction fans who collect publishers as much as they do writers; about the only one I could see myself do that with would be Penguin (and perhaps the old DAW imprint).