BSFA novel shortlist: worthy but dull

science fiction
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Torque Control has the 2009 BSFA Awards shortlists up. BSFA, stands for British Science Fiction Association and its awards are, together witht he Arthur C. Clarke award, the most important British awards in the science fiction and fantasy field (though open to non-British entries as well). The members of the BSFA will vote on these shortlists together with the members of the British national sf convention, Easterncon and the winners will be known at –you guessed– Easter.

This year there was a spark of interest in the non-fiction award, as Hal Duncan withdrew his nomination, as he felt it both wasn’t engaging sf/fantasy enough and because he felt that Deepa D’s nomination, I Didn’t Dream of Dragons deserves to win. Deepa D’s essay came out of that whole RaceFail fiasco early last year, one of the best if not the best responses to it. I agree with Duncan that it deserves to win.

Apart from that, what I found interesting about the nominations is how dull the awards short list is. Just four novels, The City and the City – China Miéville, Ark – Stephen Baxter, Yellow Blue Tibia – Adam Roberts and Lavinia -Ursula LeGuin. Apart from China’s novel I haven’t read any of them, so this is no slur on their quality, but these are all such safe choices, like a Booker shortlist with Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith. These are all four well known, succesful, well respected writers few could argue with don’t deserve this recognition, but therefore are an obvious choice for it. That makes it dull. I’d rather seen some writer I don’t know yet and don’t know what to expect from make it on the shortlist.

Sidney Mellon lives!

Comix, geekdom
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Reincarnated as a toy collector:

There is a fanboy that I see a lot at my local comic shop. His name is Eric. Eric loves the Marvel Universe line. He told me that he just thinks they are fun toys, that the lower price point makes him feel more relaxed about collecting them and that the scale was easier for him to both display and store. So, basically he was making an argument for how convenient they are. Seriously? That’s how we’re going to evaluate superhero toys now; how “easy” they are to collect? And how much “fun” they are? I’m sorry but I have no time for people that want to half ass toy collecting. If you’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to collect toys properly, then in my opinion, you don’t derserve to collect toys.

[…]

Think about it. What happens if we don’t buy comic book action figures? They won’t get made, is what. Toy companies have our nuts in a vice and they know it. They know we’re forced to buy whatever they put out. But I’m not going to sit here and be all Kum-bay-fracking-yah about what they’re forcing down my throat. I’ll buy them, but I won’t buy them without a fight.

Sidney Mellon was a parody of the worst kind of 1980ties Marvel fanboy imaginable, the kind who bought everything they brought out, thought Secret Wars II was piercing examination of the human condition and that Love and Rockets could be a good comic one day if only a solid Marvel writer like Tom deFalco would write it and half the cast was turned into mutants. He had a occasional column in Amazing Heroes, written by Gerald Jones, who took great pleasure in attacking his own comics. The guy quoted above must be a modern version of Mellon, right? Right?

Pohl for the Fan Hugo!

geekdom, science fiction
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One of the miracles of the modern world is that Frederik Pohl has a blog. Nicely chatty and interesting it is too, with much about the early days of science fiction fandom, which is enough reason for Jo Walton to nominate him for the fan Hugo. Fanzine turned blog File 770 finds this ä bit special”:

All very true. So haven’t you stopped to wonder why has he never been nominated for Best Fan Writer in any of the 40+ years the category has existed? Certainly not because his writing isn’t good enough. Nor that he failed to write about fandom — surely we all remember his autobiography “The Way the Future Was.” The real question is whether a long-time pro like Fred Pohl would take the nomination as a compliment. This enforced egalitarianism is not always welcomed by pros. Recall that Harlan Ellison turned down his Best Fan Writer nomination.

This is a bit like, as we say it Dutch, looking for nails at low tide, raising objections for the sake of objecting, rather than from genuine concern. Anybody familiar with Frederik Pohl and sf fandom enough to worry about the fan Hugo should know about his long involvement with fandom, even longer than his career as a filthy pro. The fact that he started a blog in his late eighties on which most of his posts are about his love for fandom, the history of how he get involved with fandom and science fiction and so on is a rather large clue as well that Pohl has no problems with fandom.

He’s also about the only living link with First Fandom still present and active – honouring him for this work by nominating him for a fan Hugo does not seem an insult to me and I doubt very much he would think differently. Doesn’t necessarily mean he needs to win it too, but the nomination is at very least a signal that people in fandom like and appreciate what he’s doing. Good on Jo to do so.

The idea that pros are pros and fans are fans and they’re separate species is a filthy modern heresy (for some values of modern). Pohl surely is somebody who knows otherwise. File 770 should know otherwise.

The only real objection you could make to Pohl’s nomination is the idea that people will then vote for him based purely on name recognition. Since this is a long existing problem that has never stopped anybody before, i wouldn’t worry too much about it though.

Official: Balkenende is a war criminal

Dutch politics, War Lies, War on Iraq
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He won’t appear before the International Criminal Court (conveniently located in Den Haag not too far from parliament) anytime soon, but the conclusions from the Dutch Iraq inquiry (PDF, in English) do show that the Dutch political support for the war was neither as easily decoupled from the actual war as the then government made it out to be nor justified by international law. Finally it has been officially confirmed what we all knew or at least suspected back then, that the existing UN resolutions on Iraq were never sufficient legal justification for the war. Not that anything will come from it, but at least we saw our beloved prime minister embarassed and humiliated.

I’m still reading the report as a whole, but the conclusions reached by the inquiry don’t contain any real surprises. That the war was illegal as well as immoral I knew anyway, that the decision to support the war was reached long before it was discussed in parliament, for entirely different reasons than officially stated, wasn’t news either. It was clear from the start that the CDA-led government was led by its traditional policy of “Atlantic solidarity”, a desire to engage with the US and be seen as a dependable ally of it, a lesser form of the British delusions of a special relationship. The war was never assessed on its merits, the possible outcomes were not taken into account.

Though the material support of the Netherlands for the war was small, the political effect of its support was to lend a veneer of respectability to what was essentially an unilateral US war. The distinction between “political but no military support” was completely unclear and largely elided outside the Dutch political debate, presented by the US as if it meant we had given our full support. Again, not a surprise.

Some common themes emerge from the inquiry’s conclusions, which are also coming to light in the British Chilcott inquiry. There’s the dodginess of the legal reasoning for the war, as well as the exagerration of the available evidence for WMDs — turns out the Dutch intelligence services were much more skeptical about this than the government told us at the time, shock horror. More important is the utter disdain for the democratic process shown by both governments. In the Dutch case, the inquiry concludes that the decision was rammed through parliament and went entirely against the wishes of a majority of the voters.

However I’m still convinced that the massive protests against the war in the Netherlands helped convince the government from active participation in the war, against their own instincs, as they realised they could not overcome the combination of active voter hostility and parliamentary resistance to this, including from their own MPs, at a time when the domestic political situation was far from stable. This is not directly supported by the inquiry’s conclusions, but reading between the lines the formula of “political support, but no military support” looks like a typical Dutch compromise position taken by an internally divided government unwilling to turn this disagreement into an open conflict. Interestingly during part of the runup to the war the government coalition included the LPF, the party of Pim Fortuyn, which was largely against the war, not something you’d expect considering its background…

(All of the above analysis is a bit late in the day I admit, but I’ve been busy…)