Wis[s]e Words

Meaningless guttural sounds

Published on June 11, 2013Leave a comment

It’s not too surprising that non-Danes may have problems with the Danish language:

But hard hitting Norwegian documentary series Uti Vår Hage focuses on the continuing crisis in Denmark itself, as the Danish too find it increasingly difficult to understand each other:

The solution? Speak Norwegian…

However, that has its own problems, as Danish journalist Anders Lund Madsen demonstrates, examining Norwegian swimming instructions:

For the general differences between Norwegian and Danish (as well as Swedish), a handy overview.

What’s the point of the left?

Published on June 10, 2013Leave a comment

Featuring Laurie Penny, China Mieville & Chris Nineham.

Iain M. Banks (16 February 1954 – 9 June 2013)

Published on June 9, 2013Leave a comment

Iain M. Banks has died, of the cancer he’d revealed earlier this year he had. Though the news doesn’t come as a surprise, it’s still a shock. He was only fiftynine, far too young. It’s hard to say how much he meant to me personally. I’ve never met him, or had any contact with him, but his novels, especially his science fiction were –are– incredibly important to me.

More objectively, Banks himself was a paradigm breaker, somebody who could write both science fiction and “literary” fiction and be taken seriously with both, who kept writing both and who liberally mixed in his sf with his mainstream stories. There had been other science fiction writers who went in for more mainstream literature, not to mention an army of properly literary writers dabbling in science fiction, but I think he was to first to keep consistently writing sf and literary fiction, therefore helping open up space for science fiction to be taken serious as literature.

Not to mention of course the huge influence he has had on other writers. Entire generations of British sf writers grew up in his shadow. Many of my favourite writers owe a debt to him: Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod, Jon Courtnay Grimwood, Liz Williams, Justina Robson, China Mieville, Richard Morgan, these are all writers in which I recognise Banks’ influence.

But there’s more. He was also a principled leftist, something he showed not only through his writing –the Culture as the ultimate communist post-scarity paradise– but also in his actions. He was vehemently opposed to the War on Iraq, to the point that he tore up his passport when the invasion started as a protest. As his obituary at the Stop the war Coalition website makes clear, he was also a supporter of the cultural boycott of Israel as a way to pressure the country into giving up its apartheid regime.

“We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash.” — Iain Banks, The Crow Road.

Scardown — Elizabeth Bear

Published on June 8, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Scardown

Scardown
Elizabeth Bear
368 pages
published in 2005

Scardown is Elizabeth Bear’s second novel, sequel to Hammered, continuing the adventures of Jenny Casey. Where Hammered was straight up streetlevel cyberpunk, in Scardown the perspective opens up. That opening up actually started in the last pages of Hammered and Scardown continues seamlessly. Middle books in a trilogy, as this is can often sag, neither setting up plotlines nor resolving them, but Scardown avoids this fate. Each of the books in the Hammered/Scardown/Worldwired has its own story, but together they do add up to one coherent one.

Jenny Casey is a veteran who lost her left arm and eye in a war in South Africa decades ago, replaced by fairly primitive cyborg implants. Her ability to cope and survive for so long with these implants made her an unique candidate for starship pilot training, as these pilots would need to be plugged into their spaceships. This is why she was being pursued by the Canadian government in the previous novel, Canada and China being the world’s two superpowers in 2062. The world is dying, killed by climate change and humanity’s hope lies in the stars. Which is why both superpowers are building starships, starships made possible by alien technology found on Mars.

Womentoread Wednesday 02: Leigh Brackett

Published on June 5, 2013Leave a comment

Every Wednesday, I try and showcase a female writer who is special to me for one reason or another, in an attempt to focus more attention on female sf and fantasy writers. I will limit this to writers I’ve actually read multiple books of, if only to have an excuse to link to old reviews on my booklog. This time, let’s talk about Leigh Brackett.

So I was looking through my archives to see what I’ve written about Leigh Brackett before, and I saw that each time I mentioned her I noticed that you may know her from her work writing for The Empire Strike Back. Well, can’t break tradition which is why I mentioned this again. It’s fitting that one of the best pulp science fiction authors would end up writing for the movie series whose inspiration was the sort of adventure sf Brackett wrote. Furthermore, Brackett had been an accomplished screenwriter for almost as long as she had been a science fiction writer, working on movies like The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959) and The Long Goodbye (1973). It’s also why her productivity as an sf writer dropped dramatically after the mid-fifties; there was better money in movies and television.

When she was writing science fiction, Leigh Brackett specialised in writing planetary romances, swashbuckling tales of derring do set on alien planets. In her case this usually Mars or Venus, back when it was still possible to think the other planets in the Solar System could be slightly different versions of Earth. Her Mars has the canals and dying civilisation, while Venus is a jungle planet full of primitive, massive reptiles. Nevertheless her worlds are not carbon copies of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Hers are much more alive, not just stage sets for transplanted western or jungle adventures: her Martians have agency.

What I like about the best of her writing is how well she can portray a mood in her stories with only a few well chosen words. In the sort of short pulp sf story she specialised there was little room for much characterisation or mood setting, so she always had to be economical, which she did very well. Her craft is also visible in her husband, Edmond Hamilton’s work. Hamilton was a true pulp dinosaur, but after he got married to Brackett in 1946, his work took a leap forward in quality…

The Secret of Sinharat:

Science fantasy is that subgenre of science fiction that has all the trappings of science fiction, –aliens, other planets, blasters and aircars — but which actually read a lot like sword and sorcery in disguise, with strapping barbarian heroes fighting degenerate warlocks using superscience of an earlier age that they barely understand. It’s very romantic, not very plausible or much concerned with realistic science. Science fiction in that grand pulp tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. And like Burroughs had his John Carter, Brackett has Eric John Stark, the outlaw with a twenty year Moonprison sentence on his head, raised by a strange non-human tribe on Mercury, (in)famous on three planets as a barbarian and renegade, but also as a man with his own code of honour.

People of the Talisman:

Science fantasy often tends towards the purple and melodramatic, but Brackett’s tone of voice here is cynical and knowing, the story told in short, clear sentences with more than a hint of hardboiled sensibility. Stark is a tarnished hero in the mold of Raymond Chandler’s worldweary detectives; you can see Humphrey Bogart playing him. Brackett describes the Mars she has invented in the same way, with a few well chosen images sketched with a minimum of words.

The Sword of Rhiannon:

What sets The Sword of Rhiannon a touch above other pulp adventure stories is both Brackett’s writing and that elegiac sense of loss that comes across through it. At the end of the story Carse returns to the Mars of his own day, leaving a still living world for one that is slowly dying. He may have saved Mars from the tyranny of the Dhuvians, but its ultimate fate is still fixed…

The Halfling and Other Stories:

It doesn’t help that the first two stories are basically the same. In both there’s the hardbitten protagonist falling for a mysterious beautiful alien girl who he knows is trouble yet can’t help himself but get involved with, who then turns out to be evil. Worse, in both stories this girl is shown to be representative of her race, their evil part of their biology. It’s a bit …uncomfortable… shall we say, but unfortunately these sort of assumptions are build into the kind of planetary romances Leigh Brackett wrote.