science fiction

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Comix, fantasy, science fiction
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A Game of Thrones to be filmed for tv …in Belfast? Cue dry as dust press release:

First Minister Peter D Robinson MP MLA and deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness MP MLA, have confirmed that HBO, the USA’s leading pay cable network, will film a TV pilot in Northern Ireland this year.

‘A Game of Thrones’, is scheduled to arrive in the third quarter of 2009 and is set to be an epic project. It is expected that the production will utilise various locations, as well as build a massive set in the Paint Hall.

Mr Robinson said: “This is the first time that a TV production of such vast size and scale has been filmed in Northern Ireland. The announcement comes following the visit by the deputy first Minister and I to Los Angeles in March. It will be a welcome boost to the production sector, helping develop the industry here and bringing employment and investment to Northern Ireland.

(Incidently, Paul Cornell, amongst others, is going to write for Martin’s Wild Cards series.

Samuel Delany on racism and science fiction:

Since I began to publish in 1962, I have often been asked, by people of all colors, what my experience of racial prejudice in the science fiction field has been. Has it been nonexistent? By no means: It was definitely there. A child of the political protests of the ’50s and ’60s, I’ve frequently said to people who asked that question: As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.

How to teach historical context via a single comic; that is, Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.

Factor in the photorealistic gestures and that can only be the Batsuit of the 21st Century. But why did folks at DC decide to go with the throwback costume at the dawn of a new century? Nostalgia? What happened in 2000 that made the less cartoonish Batsuit more attractive to fans of the book? Because the subtraction of the shield was not the only change: the greys now skew black, the blues shift black-navy, and the yellow of the utility belt pales to a washed and muted gold.

J. G. Ballard has died

"Literature", Auntie Beeb, science fiction
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This is how the BBC broke the news: “the author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness“. No mention whatsoever in the rest of the article that he was actually a science fiction writer and made his reputation doing exactly that. The obituary is the same, calling him “surrealistic” and as “fusing external landscapes of futuristic visions with the internal workings of his characters’ minds”. Hell, whoever wrote it didn’t even know what his first novel was: the article thinks it’s The Drowned World (1962) while it’s in fact The Wind from Nowhere (1961).

It’s the sort of lazy biography you see a lot with science fiction writers who broke out of the ghetto, where their earlier works are de-emphasised, seen as unimportant youthful mistakes or at best stepping stones to their real work. We’ve seen it with Philip K. Dick and William Gibson as well.

It annoys the fuck out of me, not so much out of some tribal loyalty to science fiction, but because you just cannot judge his later, more “mainstream” novels without knowing his earlier work. There’s a logical progression in his work going all the way back to his earliest short stories to his last novel. Ballard always was a perfect modernist “post-modernist” writer, growing up in the legacy of twentieth century modernism and dissatisfied with what it had brought, reveling in the onset of entropy bringing down its works. Whether it’s the lush tropical primeval jungle invading luxuery hotels in The Drowned Word or the anarchy depicted in High-Rise taking that symbol of post-war modernist architecture, the tower block, the images remain the same: stark, concrete forms smothered in chaotic but natural shapes. Take his more mainstream work out of this context and it loses its value.

UPDATE: David Pringle’s obituary in the Guardian is quite good, explaining why his science fiction is important as well as his evolution as a writer movign away from it. Pringle’s prediction that Empire of the Sun “is likely to be the book upon which much of his reputation will rest” is mildly depressing, especially since much of the attention paid to it stems from the fact it was made into a Spielberg movie. It’s nowhere near Ballard’s best work, though it does provide some insight in where he found certain of the images that crop up in his other work. Personally I find everything after his seventies work to be of less value.

Prador Moon – Neal Asher

books and books review, science fiction
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Cover of Prador Moon


Prador Moon
Neal Asher
248 pages
published in 2006

When I read The Voyage of the Sable Keech last year I dind’t realise at first it was part of a series of novels and quite late in the series too, which rendered it slightly more confusing than it needed to be. What I should’ve gotten instead is Prador Moon. It’s a prequel to the main series, set much earlier in its internal chronological order, doesn’t depend on knowledge of other books in it and is also a much simpler story altogether. Prador Moon is a straightforward tale of interstellar war, proper space opera. It all starts when the Polity, Asher’s star-spanning a.i.-cracy ruled from Earth central, comes up against the first alien race ever encountered by humans, the titular Prador.

Said Prador are a race of aliens looking something like a very large landcrab with slightly too many legs and which are very much a race of magnificent bastards, reveling in their evil. They can’t help it, biology makes them do it. A Prador’s life is full of danger, being reared in creches to serve their Father as loyal servants, stormtroopers and occasional food source, kept under control by pheromones. The biggest, meanest and most intelligent of the children become First Children, with some limited indepence and the potential to challenge their father’s supremacy. Whether there are female Prador is not mentioned. A Prador lives to conquer and subjugate and their whole society is built around conflict, which is why the first diplomatic meeting between humanity and the Prador was cut short when the ambassador didn’t surrender immediately, as was the ambassador himself…

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McAuley’s fifty fortyeight essential sf titles

science fiction
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Yesterday, Paul McAuley put up a list of what he thinks are the fortyeight essential science fiction titles. As per usual, I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read and struck through the ones I dislike.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus MARY SHELLEY 1818
Journey to the Centre of the Earth JULES VERNE 1863
After London RICHARD JEFFRIES 1885
The Time Machine HG WELLS 1895
The House on the Borderland WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON 1912
We YEVGENY ZAMIATIN 1924
Brave New World ALDOUS HUXLEY 1932
Star Maker OLAF STAPLEDON 1937
1984 GEORGE ORWELL 1949
I, Robot, ISAAC ASIMOV 1950
The Martian Chronicles RAY BRADBURY 1950
The Dying Earth JACK VANCE 1950
Childhood’s End ARTHUR C CLARKE 1953
The Space Merchants CM KORNBLUTH & FREDERIK POHL 1953
Tiger! Tiger! ALFRED BESTER 1956
The Death of Grass JOHN CHRISTOPHER 1956
The Seedling Stars JAMES BLISH 1957
The Midwich Cuckoos JOHN WYNDHAM 1957
Starship Troopers ROBERT A HEINLEIN 1959
A Canticle for Liebowitz WALTER M MILLER JR 1959
Solaris STANSLAW LEM 1961
Hothouse BRIAN ALDISS 1962
A Clockwork Orange ANTONY BURGESS 1962
Cat’s Cradle KURT VONNEGUT JR 1963
Martian Time-Slip PHILIP K DICK 1964
Dune FRANK HERBERT 1965
The Crystal World JG BALLARD 1966
Flowers For Algernon DANIEL KEYES 1966
Lord of Light ROGER ZELAZNY 1967
Nova SAMUEL R DELANY 1968
Pavane KEITH ROBERTS 1968
The Left Hand of Darkness URSULA K LE GUIN 1969
Roadside Picnic ARKADY AND BORIS STRUGATSKI 1969
334 THOMAS M DISCH 1972
Dying Inside ROBERT SILVERBERG 1972
The Fifth Head of Cerberus GENE WOLFE 1972
Ten Thousand Light Years From Home JAMES TIPTREE JR 1973
The Forever War JOE HALDEMAN 1974
Inverted World CHRISTOPHER PRIEST 1974
The Female Man JOANNA RUSS 1975
Arslan MJ ENGH 1976
The Ophiuchi Hotline JOHN VARLEY 1977
The Final Programme MICHAEL MOORCOCK 1968
Kindred OCTAVIA BUTLER 1979
Engine Summer JOHN CROWLEY 1979
Timescape GREGORY BENFORD 1980
Neuromancer WILLIAM GIBSON 1984
Divine Endurance GWYNETH JONES 1984

An interesting list. You can’t really argue with it, as it is after all a personal list of essential titles. It is very New Wave orientated: Roberts, Ballard, Dick, Priest, Moorcock, Delany, Le Guin, Disch undsoweiter, but with some surprises. I wouldn’t have expected to see Starship Troopers on this list based on what else is on it. On the whole, for anybody who wants to get acquainted with this particular strand of science fiction: literary, somewhat gloomy and less interested in the hard sciences than the soft sciences, this would be a good start.

In terms of McAuley’s own writing this list also makes a lot of sense. You can see the influences at work in his own novels and stories.