Teardrop Manoeuvres in the Dark

Art & Criticism, Music
Published on 4 Comments on Teardrop Manoeuvres in the Dark

Owen on Julian Cope’s autobiography, Head-on, his abilities as a writer and how wrong his musical preferences seen in retrospect: Part of what is interesting in it is in seeing just how wrong the Liverpool in-crowd (of which Cope was unabashedly one) were, how their coolness and their talent were in inverse proportion. As a rule, if the young Cope dismisses a band – John Foxx’s Ultravox, Visage, Japan, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – they will be very interesting, but if he takes them seriously – Echo and the Bunnymen, Wah!, his own group – then it’s Merseybombast all the way. .

Of course, even at the time Echo and the Bunnymen were a punchline on The Young Ones… Like Depeche Mode, they were a band always trying slightly too hard to be convincing. Cope’s own band, The Teardrop Explodes at least had the saving grace of having a sense of humour — how could it not, Cope having named it after a specific panel of a specific Daredevil comic? Cope could get awfully seriously and was convinced of his own importance as musical genius at the time, but it was always balanced by a certain playfullness his more poofaced rivals didn’t have. This is best seen in Kilimanjaro, the 1980 debut album and the Teardrops’ best, one of the best albums of the first half of the eighties: with all its punk and post-punk influences it also has a sparkling, natural lightness to it, cheerful keyboards and brass section, sort of hinting of what Paul Weller would do much later much more bombastically. There’s more than Merseybombast there.

(And isn’t that, or “Madchester” or Bristolian blagging just a localised version of second or even third city syndrome, where to even be noticed by the juggernaut that’s London you need to shout seven times louder? It’s not something we really have in the Netherlands, where Amsterdam may be the biggest city in the country, but is not much bigger than Rotterdam or Utrecht and while it may be so arrogant as to assume it’s the centre of all arts, the reality is that it’s just as provincial as any sleepy town out in the boondocks, endlessly gazing its navel, letting the other cities go on with actually doing things. But I digress.)

Fortunately Owen didn’t write this post just to slag off Cope and his pals, but to praise another of my favourite albums of that time, OMD’s Dazzle Ships:

If Dazzle Ships is a concept album, the concept seems to be communication, travel and distribution as enabled by technology, something usually carried out dispassionately, but here made overwhelmingly romantic, a pathetic fallacy for obsolete machinery, with an underlying terror at the prospect of turning ourselves over to abstractions, whether technology or capital. So there’s a willed innocence to much of it, with ‘Telegram’ making this wholly superseded technology wildly exciting – ‘I’ve got a telegram!’ he sings, attempting to tap into the joy of its early discovery. Elsewhere, it’s about deception as much as communication. The Dazzle Ships of the title are perfectly chosen, as this experiment in warpaint for Great War battleships was, until after 1945 Britain’s only major experiment with Modernist abstraction in public life, a utopian idea utilised for depressingly, if impressively atavistic purposes. The title track, with its collage of empty space, foghorns, forlorn drones and sudden, panicked alarms, is almost synaesthetic in its evocation of a locked-down landscape controlled by the defence industries, a blank lullaby to Cold War big tech.

What Dazzle Ships evokes in me is a feeling of retrofuturism. It sounds like it could be the sidetrack to one of those mid-seventies distopian big budget movies like Rollerball or Logan’s Run where most of the interest is in the set building, but unlike those movies aware that this future won’t happen. There’s an element of both repellance and fascination about technology in Dazzle Ships. On the one hand there’s that seventies view of modern technology as being inherently alienating through its use by big business and big government as tools to oppress and regimentise the life of its workers and citizen. By teh time Dazzle Ships came out this view was already oldfashioned, as both government and business were busily shedding their paternalism for other ways to screw us over. On the other hand, as Owen writes, OMD sings about these technologies with a sense of innocence, “overwhelmingly romantic”. Robots might put car workers out of work, they’re still fascinating pieces of equipment, as any twelve year old knows.

All of which evokes a certain continental view of the future as seen in the rearview mirror, of a time when it was possible to imagine the Cold War would stay semi-thawed forever and we would keep continue to have to imagine our futures under the shadow of World War III, with limited room for imagination but quite safe in a way.

Playing the race card: not actually fun

Activism, Racism
Published on

Nora explains that, no, she actually doesn’t like to become angry and outraged at casual racism in science fiction:

But I don’t understand why anyone would think I want to do this. Why anyone would think I like watching my blood pressure numbers inch up week by week. Why anyone would think I happily, eagerly “play the race card”, whatever that means — or that doing so would actually benefit me in any way. Why anyone would think I’m glad to spend hours of each week reading up about the latest imbroglios, writing responses to them, posting clandestine reviews of problematic books (and worrying about how those reviews will come back to bite me on the ass), preparing for difficult panels at cons, and bracing myself for uncomfortable interactions at every single networking event I attend. Why anyone would think I gleefully await the next instance of a stranger feeling up my hair, or a favorite author showing his ass on race and gender issues, or an established pro shouting at me that this field is a meritocracy dammit, or an even more established pro using the n-word on a woman just like me. I’m boggled by the idea that some people think I find this work desirable, much less fun, when it hurts me every damn day.

Quoted largely because I can lose sight of this too easily myself, as you can see from looking at that handsome picture on the top right, I don’t need to deal with this unless I want to. Others do not have that luxury.

Books read in July

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
Published on

Another month, another list of books read. My reading pace has slacked off a bit in the last couple of months, due to all sorts of reasons. Only eleven this month, slipping behind in my goal to read 150 this year. Oh well.

Zootsuit Black — Jon George
I wasn’t sure how to take this novel, until I interpretated it as a credible attempt to create a modern psionics novel. Irritating and engrossing in equal measures, I’m not sure this was a good novel, but it was interesting.

Cold War in a Country Garden — Lindsay Gutteridge
First in a trilogy of novels, of which I bought the third ages ago in a library sale, but which is still somewhere in my parents’ attic. Matthew Dilke has been reduced from six foot to six millimeters in height and now has to survive his own garden, to prove that human beings can survive the microworld insects have ruled so long. Absurd premise, but worked out well and Gutteridge is very good at showing the scale at which Dilke now has to live.

Iron Curtain — From Stage to Cold War — Patrick Wright
Before Churcill popularised the phrase in his famous speech in Fulton in 1946, the “Iron Curtain” as a concept had had a long prehistory already, had been used as a metaphor to describe relationships between Soviet Russia and the west in roughly the same way as Churchill used it. Wright shows how this metaphor may have had its origin in the pacifist movement around the First World War, when it was used to describe what happened when Germany and England went to war.

The Stone that Never Came Down – John Brunner
So far I really had only read Brunner’s “big” novels: Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up and so on. Which is why I tried this when I saw it for 2 euros in the secondhand bookshop. It was interesting, a very 1970ties sort of English science fiction novel: economic depression, religious intolerance and moral crusades, racial tension, unconvincing slang.

Dying Planet — Robert Markley
An excellent study of the history of Mars in science and science fiction since the late nineteenth century, how our image of the planet slowly changed, not so much by new revelations as how those revelations were interpreted. A book I needed to read with my full attention to get everything Robert Markley packed into it.

McMafia — Misha Glenny
How the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the liberalisation of trade in the late eighties and nineties meant a triumph not just for capitalism, but for globalised crime. Glenny shows how traditional, controlable crime structures collapsed with the influx of new, globalised gangsters from Eastern Europe, while the shadow economy has become more and more important to the workings of capitalism itself.

The Long Run — Daniel Keys Moran
A novel the old rec.arts.sf.written crowd was always pushing. Best described as a young adult, coming of age cyberpunk adventure, a Slan for the eighties. Dated, but if you can set yourself over the “eighty megabytes of hot RAM” and other horribly wrong computer references, quite fun if not very good.

Killer Pine — Lindsay Gutteridge
The second book in the micromen trilogy, less interesting as the first, as exploring the novelty of the situation is explored less in favour of a fairly dull sabotage plot.

Renaissance Europe 1480-1520 — J. R. Hale
Another entry in the Fontana History of Europe. Written in 1971 this no doubt somewhat outdated, but it was still a fascinating look at an era I know too little about. Hale makes clear how Medieval, how different this era still was from our own, how inward looking despite the huge revolutions in exploration and science made during it.

Camp Concentration — Thomas M. Disch
A cult classic dystopian science fiction novel, which reminded me of nothing so much as of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. They share a sense of disillusionment, the same sort of dissatisfaction with American life of the fifties and sixties but being slightly too old to be truly a part of the generation that would rebel against it, too worldweary to be part of their solutions.

Real-Time World — Christopher Priest
After the Disch, I felt the need for more New Wave science fiction and this collection of early Christopher Priest stories fitted the bill perfectly. No real classics here, Priest has always been a better novelist than a short story writer, but it sustained the low-lkey, emotionally drained mood I was looking for.

Defending the Hugos

science fiction
Published on

Over in the comments thread to the Adam Roberts’ post that kicked off the whole Hugos kerfluffle last week, Rich Puchalsky asked:

Has there ever been a good year for Hugos? Has there ever been a good year for fandom as such, in which SF fans recognized actually good writing? I’d say no. Go ahead and look back at the lists of Hugo winners for just about any year, and think “are those really the great works of SF from that period?” And really, no.

A few comments later, he clarified his position:

SF has the self-image that it is “the literature of ideas” — that what is primarily important for an SF book is the idea, not the writing quality. I think that’s a mistake, or at least incomplete. Every subgenre of writing has its particular focus, *plus* — if the work is to last — the necessity that the writing be of literary quality. A psychological novel must show psychological insight, *and* it must be well written. A political novel must have something to say about an important political issue, *and* it must strive for literary expression. And so on.

The problem with works like (to choose two of your examples) Dune, or Stand On Zanzibar, is that while their SF ideas may be well enough — especially before they were imitated — their writing is, really, pedestrian. I don’t really have space here to discuss why I think this is so, but I think it’s so.

Dune was published in 1965, which, wiki tells me (and wiki is amusingly over-developed on SF) was also the year that PKD’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch came out. Which, in literary terms, is a much better book. The disjointedness of the prose and plot reinforces the disjointedness of the world that PKD is depicting. Of course, not everyone agrees about PKD — there are arguments between critics about whether his sentences are an inspired fitting of form to theme, or just clumsy and hasty — but there are always arguments about literary works, and PKD’s works are agreed to be literary.

Stand On Zanzibar has what might qualify as a more experimental form, for SF, but Brunner took it from Dos Passos works published in the 1930s. It was really no longer new, in the wider community. 1968 was also the year that Aldiss’ Report on Probability A came out. Now, if you’re talking about experimental fiction, about the new — that book is amazing. Is it anywhere near as amusing as Brunner’s? No, nor does it take on current political issues as he did. But in terms of what it does, it’s amazing; it’s an “anti-novel”. I really don’t have time to describe it here, though I’ve written about it on my blog. It may or may not be a successful experiment, but I think that it retains more interest now, for a literary reader, than Brunner’s work does.

Now I can see where Rich is coming from, as his preferences lie with a tradition of science fiction that hasn’t been honoured much by the Hugos. He’s also right in recognising that “literary quality” hasn’t been much of a consideration in Hugo voting either, that a lot of the classic science fiction novels aren’t the first books you think of when considering “literary expression”. Genre science fiction has a long tradition of valuing content over presentation, a cultural cringe against fancy writing. Part of that comes from the genre’s pulp origins, part from the long cultural isolation of science fiction, exiled from the realms of Literature as it was (or assumed itself to be) from the twenties to the seventies. It’s partially also because the kind of people who traditionally read and write science fiction are the science and engineering geeks, prefering clarity of expression even if that means pedestrian writing. Not all science fiction readers and writers are like that of course, there always have been people as concerned with their writing as what they were writing about (Cordwainer Smith comes to mind), but in some times and places, the Hugos being one of them, it can be a dominant strain.

And yet Rich is wrong to reject the Hugos as he does. Leaving out the old copout of personal preferences and the difficulties of determining “good writing”, I think that the Hugo Awards did consistently reward works with both sfnal and literary qualities, from their inception in 1953 up to at least the late seventies. As I’ve argued earlier, this was a time when science fiction was small enough for the average Hugo voter to be knowledgable enough about the whole field to make informed choices; the rot only set in with the science fiction explosion of the eighties and beyond. And even then there have been years like 2005, when there was a novel short list of five excellent books. If you look at the four fiction categories together, (short story, novelette, novella and novel), both the winners and nominees in each category, I think it is clear that literary quality has been a factor in determining the awards over the years.

The main thing to remember about the Hugos is that they’ve always been consensus awards, that the Hugo voters have never been a solid block with everybody having the same taste, but that there have always been various currents and grouplets “fighting” for dominance in the awards. Sometimes the literary avant-garde won, sometimes the no-nonsense sensuwunda crowd ( and sometimes they were all out of their heads and we get They’d Rather Be Right or Hominids as winners…

I cannot wait to see the Games come to Amsterdam

Dutch politics, Numpties
Published on

Back in the early nineties an attempt to get the Olympic Games to Amsterdam broke down on the indifference and cynicism of the voters, not interested in the glamour and prestige this was supposed to bring to the city, but who did have a sharp eye for how much this would cost and who would end up paying that bill. Since then the Olympic lobby has kept to itself, but with the shining example of London 2012, is slowly starting to bang the drum for Amsterdam 2028, exactly a century after the first and only Dutch Olympics. And this time it’s actually taken seriously, perhaps helped to a not inconsiderable extent by the fact that this date is quite a way aways yet. Not that this means anything will come of it, but seeing how the climate here is slowly shifting towards acceptance, if not enthusiasm of the Olympics, doesn’t make me any happier reading about the way the London Olympics are organised. As I’ve noticed over the years, what happens in Britain is inevitably introduced over here in some degenerated form some years later.