geekdom – Page 24 – Wis[s]e Words

Unbearable whiteness of British science fiction

Published on March 1, 2011

Pie chart depicting the race of 2011 Clarke Award submissions

Everything is Nice has some nice, juicy posts up analysing the eligible submissions for the 2011 Clarke Award. The Clarke Award is awarded annually for the best science fiction (or fantasy) novel published in the UK the previous year. It doesn’t have a long list but a short list is selected from all submitted novels; those submissions cover roughly 90-95 percent or so of new sf&f novels being published in the UK each year. Some works of course always slip through the crack, especially from non-sf publishers who don’t know or care about the awards. The Clarke Award submissions list than is a good, but not perfect indicator of the state of the UK’s sf publishing industry and as such Martin Lewis has analysed them, which resulted in e.g. the figure above.

In other words: sf publishing is only marginally less white than the group of writers the BBC thinks represents the future of British literary fiction. And worse, it has a much bigger gender imbalance: only 17 percent of the 54 novels submitted this year were written by women. Martin also looks at other identity markers (sexuality, nationality) and it all points to the conclusion that it’s largely straight, white British or American men that were published last year. (The raw data for all this can be found at Torque Control. )

The questions this inevitably puts to mind are a) is this analysis reliable when applied to the general state of the UK’s sf&f publishing industry as opposed to just the Clarke Award submissions b) is this a bad thing (imo: yes) and c) what can we do about it?

Assuming the answer to a) and b) are both yes, the question what we readers can do to change this situation is a difficult one to answer. You can only buy what’s being published after all and if only two books out of fifty-plus are by people of colour, how big an impact will it have when enough people buy their books? It’s easier to send a signal by boycotting a given company’s products, not so easy to express a preference through your buying habits. More projects and media attention to under represented people in science fiction as with the various “women sf writers” reading projects started this year would be a start, but are only suited to provide attention to this problem, not solve it. Suggestions?

Pavlovian scolding

Published on February 17, 2011

I have a fair amount of sympathy for the idea that you shouldn’t give trolls undeserved attention, even famous trolls, but Cheryl Morgan hacked me off:

Yesterday I launched Salon Futura #6 on the world. Like any publisher, I watched keenly for online reaction to my new baby, and a few people were very kind about it. Thank you, folks. But honestly I didn’t expect much reaction. You see, I hadn’t set out to offend anyone.

What did get a lot of reaction from teh intrawebs yesterday? Well, some ignorant prat wrote a long blog post about nihilism in modern fantasy, which served mainly to demonstrate his lack of knowledge of fantasy’s history, his lack of breadth of reading in modern fantasy (I suspect he’s never read a book by a woman in his life) and probably his lack of understanding of nihilism (though I’ll leave that to people with philosophy degrees to deal with). As journalism it was, to put it bluntly, a foetid heap of steaming dingo’s kidneys. So of course my little corner of teh intrawebs went apeshit over it.

The one thing more tiresome than engaging trolls is complaining about other people engaging trolls, especially when you make it seem that you’re mostly offended that they don’t pay attention to you. Which I’m sure wasn’t Morgan’s intent, but it does come across that way. I’m sure she understands something like Salon Futura with its mixture of short stories and thoughful non-fiction takes time to digest and reflect on, while Leo Grin’s fart of outrage takes no more than five minutes to read and mock. It makes for a nice bit of light entertainment as it does the round of Twitter and sf&f blogs, with e.g. Joe Abercrombie responding to it with some deft skewering:

But why all the fury, Leo? Relax. Pour yourself a drink. Admire your unrivalled collection of Frank Frazetta prints for a while. Wrestle the old blood pressure down. When an old building is demolished to make way for a new, I can see the cause of upset. Hey, depending what’s lost and what’s gained, I might be upset myself. Let’s all take a look at the plans together and see if we can work something out. But books don’t work that way. If I choose to write my own take on fantasy, what gets destroyed? What loss are we bewailing here?

That’s very far from the “pornography of rage” Morgan talks about, more a sort of bemused merriment at the idea that somebody can be so threatened by any kind of fantasy that isn’t like he imagined the “two titanic literary talents” J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard wrote that he has to write such a dumb polemic. It can be interesting to dissect, though I won’t bother myself, to understand why somebody is so insecure that he has to imagine that any fantasy he dislikes is not just to his taste, but actively undermining western civilisation…. To scold those who are interested in doing this seems counterproductive.

Google: threat or menace

Published on February 16, 20111 Comment

It’s a bit self serving, but this Torrentfreak article about Google censorship does raise a genuine concern about its power as the world’s number one search engine:

Apparently Google has decided that its users should not be searching for the keyword BitTorrent, so why list any results then? It’s the beginning of the end.

Jamie King, the founder of Vodo – a platform where artists can share their work with million of people at no cost – agrees with this assessment. Searching for one of their perfectly legal releases on Google used to suggest the word “torrent” with a link to the download page, but not anymore.

“Google already showed it will censor for the highest bidder — China Inc. springs to mind. Now it’s doing it for MPAA & Co.,” King told TorrentFreak.

“I guess it’s simple: our favorite search monopoly cares less about helping the thousands of independent creators who use BitTorrent to distribute legal, free-to-share content than they do about protecting the interests of Big Media in its death throes.”

If you’re not on Google, you’re effectively invisible on the internet. Google therefore has an inordinate amount of power, yet barely any accountability. As a commercial organisation, their only responsibility is to their bottom line, fluff about “not being evil” notwithstanding, Yet having say a nationalised version of Google would not fill me with confidence either. Google is one of the ‘net’s natural chokepoints and what we need to get if we want to keep the internet free is a decentralised Google. Think what might have happened had Google censored the news of the Egyptian revolution.

You follow me on Twitter…

Published on February 8, 20111 Comment

A piece of graffiti found in Amsterdam Noord. Roughly translated it means “you follow me on Twitter, but will cross the street when you meet me”. No idea who put it there, but it’s been there for at least a year or so. Thanks to my nifty new HTC Wildfire phone I finally could photograph it.

It’s not called the Third Wave for nothing

Published on January 10, 20111 Comment

I missed this back in late November, but apparantly a minor blogstorm erupted when Cosma Shalizi posted his “semi-crank pet notion” that the singularity had already happened

The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918.

Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.

Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.

Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.

Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.

Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters”? Check; we call them “the self-regulating market system” and “modern bureaucracies” (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.

An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. (“Drive” is the best I can do; words like “agenda” or “purpose” are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)

And two months later I end up wondering why, because this is hardly controversial or new. If the dirty little secret of science fiction is cribbing from history, than cyberpunk’s dirty little secret is how much it ripped off the ideas of futurologist Alvin Toffler. The Third Wave was cyberpunk’s bible aqnd you can see a direct line from it to Gibson’sNeuromancer or Sterling’s Schismatrix as these authors embraced its vison of a future of relentless change, where the old political and economical schemas were worthless and new economies and ways of living needed to be invented. The world was going to be transformed, but Toffler never pretended this was anything new.

It was after all the Third Wave, not the First Wave. That had been the invention of agriculture and its subsequent spread over the world, not yet completed when the second wave happened, the industrial revolution, also not yet completed now the third wave, the computer and internet and biotech and $insert_favourite_kewl_new_technology revolution is happening. Three singularies, not The singularity. Cosma was pushing on a door not just already open, but never closed in the first place.

But it is good to be reminded sometimes that all this talk about singularies and the uniqueness of the technological revolution we’re now living in, part libertarian technofascism, part nerdgasm, is just another test of Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as an Ipad presentation.