The Christmas story China Miéville did for the Socialist Review is finally online. Worth reading just for the absolutely horrible pun about halfway through.
science fiction
The annotated Today in Alternate History
Y’all might be familiar with Today in Alternate History,
the weblog that explores what could’ve happened in small short news chunks. Now Michel Vuijlsteke,
of the excellent Belgian (Dutch language) weblog Tales of Drudgery
and Boredom, has produced The annotated Today in Alternate History, taking those entries and explaining them, frex:
1 August 1779: The Star-Dotted Heavens
Composer Francis Scott Key was born. After the birth of the North American Confederation,
he penned its national anthem, The Star-Dotted Heavens.Francis Scott Key (1780-1843)
Lawyer and amateur poet. In the real world he wrote the words to The Star Spangled Banner after
the siege of Fort McHenry in 1814. Sung to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven, it became the United
States’ national anthem in 1931. The actual “star spangled banner” that flew over McHenry now resides in the Smithsonian.
Behind the green door
On a somewhat lighter note, after the serious entries of the past week, this is the start of a thread on soc.history.what-if in which James Nicoll starts speculation about what would happen if the US in 1958 found a doorway in time to the Earth of 250,000,000 A.D.. This evidently fired the imagination of the posters there, as there is quite a lot of good, interesting speculation throughout the thread. Even though I like blogs quite a lot, Usenet still beats them when it comes to sustained discussion like this.
Related links:
The Epona Project, an attempt to create a believable extrasolar in detail.
One view of Earth 250,000,000 A.D.
The Future is Wild, the website of the tv series of
that name, which explored a similar issue. Heavy use of Flash.
Quickfire round
A quick round of sf links.
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The online science fiction zine Infinity Plus has a new interview up with Christopher Priest (the UK sf
writer, not the US comics writer). I just read his latest novel, The Separation, which I liked very much and which this interview is largely concerned with.
Infinity Plus
Christopher Priest interview
The other Chris Priest -
Also in Infinity Plus, an interview with Ted Chiang, short story writer extraordinary. He doesn’t write
much, less than a story a year, but his stories are always excellent. They’re clever stories, both for
their sf content as for their stylistic tricks and they feature believable characters.
Interview with Ted Chiang
(Both this and the above interview found via Sore Eyes.) -
Meanwhile, as you have noticed, famed socialist Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has
gotten a blog. Like his stories, it’s very politically orientated.
The Early Days of a Better Nation -
I found the following interview with Nicola Griffith while searching for something unrelated. Haven’t read any of her books yet, but the interview is still interesting. Not very up to date though, as it dates back to 1994. Explore the rest of the site too.
Nicola Griffith -
Finally, two Mary Gentle essays, one on worldbuilding and one on the attraction of villains and
shop soiled heroes.
Machiavelli, Marx And The Material Substratum
Hunchbacks, Sadists, And Shop-Soiled Heroes
Mary Gentle
Mary Gentle is an British writer of fantasy and science fiction, who finally got some of the attention she deserves in 1999, with her excellent fantasy/secret history book Ash: A Secret History. Before that, she was better known as the writer of the darkly humouristic Grunts, a novel about those bad boys of fantasy Orcs, (featuring such lines as “Pass me another elf, this one has split“), as well as of the science fiction duology Golden Witchbreed/Ancient Light. The latter is what I first read of her and are also the books with which she first gained prominence.
However, some of her more obscure and less accesible books also deserve a wider audience, but apparantely are too difficult or too weird to have gained one. I’m talking of the White Crow series, which consists of several short stories as well as the novels Rats and Gargoyles, The Architecture of Desire and Left to His Own Devices. They take place in a sort of alternate 17th century England, where the compass has a fifth direction to it, (and the directions are all still 90 degrees apart), a female Charles Stuart and Olivier Cromwell, a magic system based on alchemy. And yet their author still insists they are science fiction rather than fantasy.
It’s no wonder then that Mary Gentle has just as outspoken ideas about her role as a science fiction writer:
A slightly less megalomaniac way of saying that I write to reform the SF/fantasy field is to say that I’m a reactive writer. When I see something done wrong, I want to do it right. When I see SF and fantasy novels that insult the intelligence of a weevil, I want to write a novel with an academic book list in the back of it. Or one that bases a lot of obscure English Civil War jokes on the conceit that Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell were female. When I get up to here with cyber-utopias fronted by dim young men who do not know where their dicks are, Valentine starts making waspish remarks and gets herself a job with the military-industrial complex. When I have seen more gaming fantasy-magic than even I can take, I want to write about a magic that works by pictorial association from a vocabulary of Baroque images. And when I see SF with a crew from central casting, and a political stance as naïve as the Sun, then I start writing near-future SF about Valentine and Casaubon’s messy home lives and respective families, and Marlowe’s take on the Internet.