science fiction – Page 85

Award lists considered harmful

Published on February 10, 2009

Via James Nicoll, the list of winners of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (but not the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer). In bold are those I’ve read, while the ones I read but thought filled a much needed gap in literature are struck through:

1973 – Beyond Apollo, Barry N. Malzberg
1974 (tie) – Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke; Malevil, Robert Merle
1975 – Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Philip K. Dick
1976 – The Year of the Quiet Sun, Wilson Tucker (special retroactive award for a novel from 1970)
1977 – The Alteration, Kingsley Amis
1978 – Gateway, Frederik Pohl
1979 – Gloriana, Michael Moorcock
1980 – On Wings of Song, Thomas M. Disch
1981 – Timescape, Gregory Benford
1982 – Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
1983 – Helliconia Spring, Brian W. Aldiss
1984 – The Citadel of the Autarch, Gene Wolfe
1985 – The Years of the City, Frederik Pohl
1986 – ~~The Postman~~, David Brin
1987 – A Door into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski
1988 – Lincoln’s Dreams, Connie Willis
1989 – Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling
1990 – The Child Garden, Geoff Ryman
1991 – Pacific Edge, Kim Stanley Robinson
1992 – Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Bradley Denton
1993 – Brother to Dragons, Charles Sheffield
1994 – No award
1995 – Permutation City, Greg Egan
1996 – The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter
1997 – Fairyland, Paul J. McAuley
1998 – Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman
1999 – Brute Orbits, George Zebrowski
2000 – A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
2001 – Genesis, Poul Anderson
2002 (tie) – Terraforming Earth, Jack Williamson; The Chronoliths, Robert Charles Wilson
2003 – Probability Space, Nancy Kress
2004 – Omega, Jack McDevitt
2005 – Market Forces, Richard Morgan
2006 – Mindscan, Robert J. Sawyer
2007 – Titan, Ben Bova
2008 – In War Times, Kathleen Ann Goonan

Not a great score, though several of the books I haven’t read yet are on my bookshelves (e.g. Gloriana). Others though, especially post-1990, just don’t appeal at all. McDevitt, Sawyer and Baxter for example are all writers who are at best mediocre (though Baxter surprised me recently). Which brings me to the question of whether anybody ever uses these award lists as a reading guide? If you’re already familiar with science fiction and fantasy seeing who’s nominated for a Hugo might be interesting, but what if you’re new to the genre? Personally I doubt these lists will give you a good overview of the field.

Take the two biggest awards. The Hugo is voted on by a dwindling number of science fiction fans who take the trouble of registering for this year’s Worldcon and whose taste tends towards the conservative and middle of the road. The Nebula on the other hand is determined by the Science Fiction Writers of America members, which sounds better than it is, as there’s a lot of politics involved in determining the winners and again the members tend to be more conservative than the actual readers. With both there have been long stretches in which the award was consistently given to mediocre books. So if you’re a new reader or trying to assemble a reading list for somebody to get acquainted with science fiction, just following the award lists would lead to reading a lot of godawful dull books.

When I started reading science fiction I did it through the local library, then later discovered fanzines (Holland SF) which pointed me in the direction of good books; these days there are of course plenty of blogs talking about sf as well. That would be my advice: try books out from the library and look for reviewers you trust, rather than award lists.

Science fiction is no good they holler until we’re deaf…

Published on February 2, 2009

If it’s good, then it’s no sf:

What do novels about a journey across post-apocalyptic America, a clone waitress rebelling against a future society, a world-girdling pipe of special gas keeping mutant creatures at bay, a plan to rid a colonisable new world of dinosaurs, and genetic engineering in a collapsed civilisation have in common?

They are all most definitely not science fiction.

Literary readers will probably recognise The Road by Cormac McCarthy, one of the sections of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood from their descriptions above. All of these novels use the tropes of what most people recognise as science fiction, but their authors or publishers have taken great pains to ensure that they are not categorised as such.

On the one hand, it’s enough to give any genre an inferiority complex. Science fiction has always been uncool and unloved, rarely getting widespread critical love or street cred, but with many of its best practitioners getting siphoned off into the realms of literature being discovered years or decades after science fiction fans had discovered their talents. It’s not just mainstream writers or their publishers quick to distinguish their novels of the future from the dreaded esseff, it’s also the retroactive reclassification of writers like Ballard, Dick or LeGuin as something better than mere sf writers. It’s cultural appropriation of the worst kind (joke…)

On the other hand, I do understand why certain writers want to distance their books from the genre. Leaving aside base commercial motivations, it’s also a way of managing expectations. A novel like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale for example wasn’t written as a science fiction
novel, but in the spirit of a much older literary tradition, the utopian/dystopian story. It doesn’t conform to science fiction conventions and its science fictional content is there as a tool, not a purpose.

On the gripping hand, this sort of thing can be really irritating, especially when you get mainstream writers who are trying to write proper science fiction, without love for the genre or much knowledge about and whose pedestrian treatments of lonmg chewed over ideas are hailed as groundbreaking.
P. D. James’ The Children of Men is a good example of this: an old idea, not very well thought through but published to wide critical acclaim denied to the sf works that treated this same subject better (like Philip Jose Farmer’s short story “Seventy Years of Decpop”).

But what can you do? Compared to where we were even twenty years ago we can’t really complain and besides, for every literature snob there’s a science fiction fan proud of his ignorance of anything this side of Perry Rhodan. Read what you like and remember that mainstream literature is a genre too.

The H-Bomb Girl — Stephen Baxter

Published on November 17, 2008

Cover of The H-Bomb Girl

The H-Bomb Girl
Stephen Baxter
265 pages
published in 2007

This is a book that’s going to give me nightmares, I can tell. Because I grew up as a kid in the Second Cold War, the last kids to grow up in the shadow of Nuclear Holocaust, when one side was ruled by a succesion of doddering paranoid old men who had gotten their job training under Uncle Stalin and the other was governed by a cowboy actor who half the time seem to believed he had been the war hero his b-movie career had portrayed him, I’ve always been fascinated and horrified by nuclear war. I remember having h-bomb nightmares almost every night when I was eight or ten. Even now, just reading the Wikipedia description of Threads is enough to give me bad dreams, let alone reading a novel the centrepiece of which is an all too realistic description of what could’ve happened to Britain if the Cuban Missile Crisis had not been defused in time. I can only imagine what the intended young adult audience for The H-Bomb Girl will think of it, having grown up with very different nightmares.

So far Stephen Baxter had never impressed me with his writing. I’ve read and enjoyed several of his short stories scattered through various anthologies, but bounced hard of his awful Mammoth novels while the other work of his I’ve come across never appealed to me. The only reason I picked up The H-Bomb Girl in the library was because it got talked about over at Torque Control during the runup to the Clarke Awards. Reading the first few pages intrigued me enough to take it home. Once I started reading it in earnest today I got sucked in and didn’t stop until it was finished. There’s not many books that I do that with these days. Score one for Baxter.

Driftglass — Samuel R. Delany

Published on November 16, 2008

Cover of Driftglass

Driftglass
Samuel R. Delany
318 pages
published in 1971

Samuel Delany is one of my favourite science fiction writers and in my opinion one of the best science fiction writers ever. Considering the cover blurb on this collection of short stories, I’m not alone in that opinion. According to Frederick Pohl, not a bad writer himself, “Delany may be the only authentic genius among us”. High praise indeed, but Delany deserves it. Everything I’ve read of his, including his earliest novels, displayed a mastery of both language and story, a lively imagination and ability to create novel but believable world and most importantly a grasp of the importance of culture that’s rare in science fiction, especially when he first started writing.

He is however more of a novelist than a short story writer, having written not nearly as many short stories as his contemporaries. in fact, Delany debuted with a novel at a time when science fiction was still largely a magazine driven field. It was only after he had established himself as a writer that he started publishing some of his short stories. Driftglass was his first collection, containing work written between ’65 and ’68 and published between 1967 and 1970. It’s a great collection, with two absolute classics in it: the Nebula winning “Aye, and Gomorrah…” as well as “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. Not to mention several other excellent stories.

Tales — H. P. Lovecraft

Published on October 21, 2008

Cover of Tales

Tales
H. P. Lovecraft
838 pages
published in 2005

This deceptively slim volume, much slimmer than the similarly titled 1997 Jocye Carol Oates edited collection of Lovecraft stories, turned out to be printed on the kind of paper they use to print those teeny tiny complete bibles with. So what I thought would be a week’s worth of reading actually needed two long train journeys to finish, by the time I was somewhat bored with Lovecraft’s eldritch obsessions. After a while all the lurking horrors and dwellers in the darkness start to blur into each other and the descriptions turn from atmospheric into mildly ridiculous. Lovecraft is not a writer you should over indulge in; it’s better to read him sparingly story by story.

As a collection this is an impressive book, part of the prestigious Library of America series set up to safeguard America’s literary heritage. That H. P. Lovecraft, as first science fiction, horror or fantasy writer is allowed in these hallowed pages as a genre writer, not ust an established literary figure dabbling in these genres, is a good sign of how far these genres have penetrated literary
consciousness. You may quibble about Lovecraft as a first choice, but he has slowly evolved from a cult writer into one appreciated as much for his literary qualities as his ability to scare his readers so he’s certainly not an undefensible choice.