“Literature” – Page 5

John Mullan is a silly ass

Published on September 23, 2009

Booker Prize judge made a bit of a silly ass of himself responding to Kim Stanley Robinson’s challenge to the Booker Prize about the lack of science fiction on its short lists, by saying:

John Mullan, Naughtie’s fellow judge for this year’s prize and professor of English at University College London, said that he “was not aware of science fiction,” arguing that science fiction has become a “self-enclosed world”.

“When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres,” he said, but now “it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”

He’s so wrong. Science fiction has always been “in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other”! Even when he was eighteen this was the case unless he was that age sometime in the early thirties or so, science fiction cons have been around longer than he has. It has never been fully seen as acceptable literature by the sort of people who sit in Booker Prize juries and there has never been “a genre as accepted as other genres” though admittedly there have been times when mainstream authors and critics have been more in tune with it than others.

The responses to such backhanded snobbery are predictable. As seen in the comments to Ken’s post on this, many science fiction fans are defensive and hurt and respond like a teenager bounced from the Kool Kids Klub — “I don’t want to join your smelly club anyway”. Some, as seen on Torque Control ignore the insults and earnestly try to explore the question of why the Bookers boycott science fiction and what to do to change it. Finally, there are the people who’ve seen it all before, amused both by the snobbery and the philistine defensiveness of many fans.

For myself, I’ve sort of lost that reflexive defensiveness, where you take out your annoyance at the casual dismission of science fiction by erm casually dismissing everything else, but I don’t like to entirely dismiss this reflex either as seem to be the trend amongst sections of online fandom. Look at how grownup and above it all we can be, not like those stinky nerds still living in their mommy’s basement who actually take all that stuff seriously. In the high school reenactment society that’s fandom, that’s just pandering to the jocks by making fun of your fellow nerds, not realising they’re laughing at you as much as with you…

Dead Iraqis

Published on July 11, 20092 Comments

Ellis sharp has a new book out from New Ventures. Nicholas Lezard reviews it for The Guardian:

But other stories pile anything and everything in. One would not have thought an author could link Che Guevara and the Loch Ness monster, but Sharp does. Sharp is sui generis. At times he comes across as if he were a compound hallucination dreamed up by Iain Sinclair, William Burroughs (formulaically only; few drugs and no pederasty here) and . . . well, himself. This might sound like an unappealing mix but I am delighted to have read him. You can trust him because beneath the zaniness, at the level of the sentence, he is very good indeed. This is not magic realism. These are the bad dreams of the 20th century.

Wait, Dickens did what?

Published on June 16, 20091 Comment

Dickens himself took a swing at the mystery genre with his 1870 novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and perhaps laid the groundwork for some of our greatest film mysteries, particularly some of the open-ended films of Alfred Hitchcock. Drood, you see, is left unresolved, the case unfinished, allowing (perhaps forcing) readers to imagine the ending, constructing a resolution that fits the facts as they interpreted them. It was a risky literary trick and few save Dickens could have pulled it off.

If the rest of the research in Thrill-Ride: The Dark World of Mysteries and Thrillers is as good as this titbit, remind me not to read it. Remind me also not to piss off Nick Mamatas with do my research for me type questions…

J. G. Ballard has died

Published on April 19, 2009

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.

A Writer’s Diary – Virginia Woolf

Published on April 12, 2009

Cover of A Writer's Diary

A Writer’s Diary
Virginia Woolf
350 pages including index
published in 1953

A Writer’s Diary is an extract of her personal diaries put together by her husband and widower Leonard Woolf a decade or so after her death. It’s been edited to keep out the more personal entries as well as to slim down the original twentysix handwritten volumes to a more managable size. What remains is a volume of entries detailing Virginia Woolf’s writing process, enlivened by sprinklings of literary gossip and the occasional entry talking about the general state of the world. The diary starts in 1918 and ends in march of 1941, not long before her death. Although the only other Virginia Woolf book I’ve read was A Room of One’s Own some four years ago, this didn’t really matter; you don’t need to know her other work to find meaning in this, nor is it spoiled by reading about the process by which it was created first.

Virginia Woolf was not the happiest of writers. Throughout her life she suffered from nervous breakdowns, as also seen in her diary, and she ultimately ended her life by drowning herself after she felt “the madness” returning. She also suffered from extreme mood swings, which is clearly visible reading through A Writer’s Diary, where one day she would write with pleasure how well the writing on a given book went, the next day despairing about the critical reception she expected for the same book. In some of the entries talking about social events you can also see that while she enjoy being social, these sort of things took a lot of energy out of her. As somebody relatively introvert myself, I can sympathise.