Month: December 2006

Salon Fantastique: The Guardian of the Egg

As one of the three people on the internet who didn’t much care for Christopher Barzak’s 2005 story “The Language of Moths” — it was the combination of a magic autistic girl and lashings of sentiment that did it for me — I approached his entry in Salon Fantastique with a certain amount of wariness. There are a couple of superficial similarities between the two stories, in that both are about families, and in particular about a brother watching something magical happen to a sister, and both feel like they come from the soil of America. But “The Guardian of the Egg” is a bit more restrained, and a good bit more peculiar, and both of those things work in its favour.

The brother in question is Stephen, and the peculiarity is one of those daft premises that are easy to think up but much harder to make into satisfying stories. In its up-front matter-of-factness, “The Guardian of the Egg” reminded me slightly of Joe Hill’s wonderful “Pop Art”, whose opening sentences introduce us to the inflateable Art Roth with an almost completely straight face in much the same way that Barzak here introduces us to Stephen’s sister Hester: a girl neither popular nor remarkable, who becomes somewhat more remarkable and somewhat less popular when a tree starts growing out of her head.

To make this work, the story has to walk a fine line between seriousness and wonder. If, for example, we started laughing at the story when Hester’s doctor tells her parents that “She’s coping quite well”; or if the absurdity of the clothes Hester’s mother makes her rapidly-growing daughter outweighed the pathos of the situation; or if we ever thought too hard about the fact that apparently the whole story has been made into a TV movie called Wild Things; then it would all fall apart. On the other hand, if the story ignored such practical considerations as doctors and clothes (the TV movie is clearly more optional) then the magic of the situation, the ongoing transformation of Hester, would be too untethered from human experience, and would likely fall flat. Or, as Stephen puts it, when it becomes apparent that his sister’s transformation is starting to affect the family house:

Ferns should not be growing in bedrooms, unless they are potted. Vines should not grow over mailboxes, unless the mailbox is in a jungle outpost. Tiger lilies should not grow in place of a girl’s eyelashes. There are rules in this world.

Sometimes you just have to go with it: Hester’s schoolfriends teasing her in exactly the same way (you sense) that they teased her for getting braces stretches credulity somewhat. But there are rules in this world, and they hold — not our rules, but internally consistent ones. So even though we know, on some level, that it wouldn’t really happen this way, we never quite admit it to ourselves. Instead we are seduced: by the gentle warmth of the catalysed sibling friendship, and the rush as their whole town succumbs to spring, becoming a riot of nature rediscovered. And we leave the story smiling.

Salon Fantastique: My Travels with Al-Qaeda

It’s a sneaky trick, this book: an unthemed anthology prettied up to look like a themed one. [EDIT: But see the comments] Why such fancy-dress should be necessary is unclear to me, but apparently it is (at least, with a couple of small-press exceptions, unthemed anthologies seem to be few and far between at the moment), and if that’s what it takes to give me the kind of enjoyable whiplash that going from “Concealment Shoes” to “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” gave me then, well, that’s what it takes. That said, the jump between Youmans’ story and this is only an exaggerated version of the jump between Shepard’s and di Filippo’s, or di Filippo’s and Youmans’. Theme anthologies are all very well, but they don’t tend to give you the sense of possibility, or the shock of the unexpected, that Salon Fantastique is giving me.

Not that the fragmented style, insistent tone, or serious subject of Lavie Tidhar’s story were, in themselves, surprises. Reading “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” after an extremely conventional story like “Concealment Shoes” made those aspects stand out, but in the last twelve months, Tidhar has published a bunch of stories, in venues like SCIFICTION, Clarkesworld Magazine and Strange Horizons; and most of them have been, in one sense or another, bold. They may not have been entirely successful (“My Travels with Al-Qaeda” isn’t quite a home run, either), but they almost always feel like Tidhar has something to say, and is trying to find the best way to say it.

This time around, “something to say” is a meditation on the aftershocks of terrorism, and “the best way” is fragmentation. “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” contains more subsections than pages, and despite its brevity includes two poems (both by Israeli writer Lior Tirosh who, if Google and the law of conservation of initials are anything to go by, is fictional) and two brief statements, by Martin Ayub and Khalid Saleh, taken from real FBI transcripts made in the wake of the 1998 US Embassy bombings. The fictional meat of the story focuses on a couple, a woman called Alyson and the unnamed (male?) narrator, and is stitched out of vignettes set in, primarily, Dar-es-Salaam in 1998, Tel Aviv in 2004, and London in 2005.

What is actually happening is unclear — one senses that Tidhar knows but, either deliberately or inadvertently, has not left quite enough textual clues for the reader to be able to piece together the backstory with certainty. “I keep going back to the disaster areas”, the narrator tells us at the start of the story; one interpretation of the last sentence is that this is literally true, that the 1998 bombings caused the narrator to come unstuck in time, Billy Pilgrim style, and that some attractive force exerted brings them back into the world at or near similar events. Another interpretation is that events are simply being told out of sequence: we also told “Perhaps it starts, if it starts at all, in July 2005”. Those appear to be the two poles of the story, at any rate. “Somehow,” the narrator says, “we are caught between these two summers, and the seasons freeze”; later, he likens their experience to a videotape played over and over again, looped with no resolution. A third interpretation is that the story is a dream, a jumbled up mash of recollection and imagination. This would suit the narrator’s omniscience, and their apparent ability to know what the other characters in the story are thinking, are dreaming.

To a large extent, it doesn’t matter which is the case. The power of the story — which is considerable — is in its effect on the reader. “Just another collapsed dream” is how one of the poems describes the ruins of the American Embassy in Nairobi, and whether the phrase is original to Tidhar or borrowed from Tirosh, the feelings of helplessness and resignation that it implies saturate the story. The world itself becomes oppressive — “August heat squats over low buildings” and “Night covers the tarmac as if trying […] to hide the city’s flaws” — and for a dozen pages or so, we are trapped in the loop with the narrator. But even when we’ve turn the page and escaped, the effect of the story lingers: we remember the urgency and economy of the telling, and the sharp sudden pains that are told.

Salon Fantastique: Concealment Shoes

I don’t think I’ve previously encountered any of Marly Youmans’ work; but going by her website, at least some of her fantasy has been young-adult-oriented, and on the evidence of “Concealment Shoes” that doesn’t come as a surprise, for several reasons. First, it is a story about a sister (Beatrice, 14) and a brother (James, unspecified-but-younger), settling into their new home, their family having moved from the South to the North of the US. (The setting, I think, is roughly contemporary, although the titular tradition dates from the 18th century). Second, the stakes feel lower than in the other stories I’ve read so far; these are characters too young to have anything to atone for, and equally their innocence is never seriously threatened.

And third, Beatrice and James have more agency than any of the other characters I’ve encountered so far. In “The Night Whiskey” and “The Lepidopterist”, the protagonists were apprentices. They were involved in the story, but more by having things happen to them than doing things. Similarly, in “Femaville 29”, Parrish reacts more than he acts, and when he does act, it is usually in ways peripheral to the true story. In “Concealment Shoes”, on the other hand, Beatrice and James cause the problem — during a game of hide-and-seek in their rambling new cottage, stuffed with packing crates and boxes, James discovers two shoes, one small one large, stuck up a chimney. Beatrice helps him take them down, only for the two to discover that by so doing they’ve broken a ward that lay on the house, admitting a demon. So then, inevitably, the two children set about fixing the problem, by collecting one shoe for every member of their family and replacing the set that were in the chimney. There is still an element of distance between the reader and the action — Beatrice is the main viewpoint character, but it’s James who experiences “the signal moment” of his childhood — but it’s much less than in the Ford, the Shepard, or the di Filippo.

It has the feel of a thoroughly professional piece of writing that achieves what it sets out to do. The exciting bits are, mostly, exciting; the creepy bits are, mostly, creepy (particularly when the smoke demon is menacing Beatrice and James’ sleeping older brother); and the charming bits are, mostly, charming, although I could have done without the cat, or at least without the cat’s too-precious-for-words name, “Princess Owl”. It’s an adventure, and it zips along, and ends neatly. But when it’s done, it’s done. It doesn’t haunt; it evaporates: and so I find myself with little more to say.

Salon Fantastique: Femaville 29

If I tell you that on the second page of this story a tsunami is described as looking “like a liquid mountain mounted on a rocket sled”, it probably sounds like I’m saying “Femaville 29” is typical Paul di Filippo: slightly parodic, slightly manic, with some big boffo concept at its core. And to an extent that’s true, since it’s a story where plot is king, and characters hook up with an almost charming disregard for anything so prosaic as motivation, and the protagonist does have the rather daft name of Parrish Hedges. But, as it turns out, that tsunami is headed west across the Atlantic. It smashes into an unnamed city on the Eastern seaboard of the US, Parrish’s home, and the rest of the story takes place in the titular refugee camp (FEMA being the Federal Emergency Management Agency). The political sentiment is clear, if somewhat self-flagellating.

But that’s not the core of the story, either. Lip-service is paid to the sense of trauma such a catastrophe must cause, but if anything, for the survivors it turns out to have been a boon, by clearing away the detritus of their world. “The first week after the disaster”, we learn, felt like “an open-ended New Year’s Eve, the portal to some as-yet undefined millennium where all our good resolutions would come to pass.” When Parrish is interviewed by the FEMA reallocation officials, he rejects the placements they offer him, explicitly because he doesn’t want to leave the “interzone of infinite possibility” that the camp represents. And it’s not just him; nobody in the camp, it seems, wants to move on. Parrish’s explanation for why nobody wants to go somewhere secure and sensible is that everyone “wants to be reborn as phoenixes” because that’s what it would take to justify the loss they’ve suffered.

Written down so plainly, such a scenario looks crass and juvenile, because it is; yet in di Filippo’s hands, it somehow becomes breezy and infectious. It’s a gift that can sometimes make di Filippo seem an old-fashioned writer, and something of a big kid. You sense that, for him, sf is, genuinely and largely unironically, a toybox — that being an sf writer is, to borrow the phrase Bruce Sterling used in the introduction to his most recent collection, “a golden opportunity to get up to most any mischief imaginable”. And he’s good enough at it that we keep turning the pages, and while we do we don’t notice that the plot is running on convenience (Parrish hooks up with a woman called Nia, but said hooking is entirely irrelevant except that it brings him into the orbit of Nia’s daughter Izzy). Or if we notice we don’t care. In most Paul di Filippo stories, we’re on first-name terms with all the characters, and we like it that way.

If “Femaville 29” is a kind of wish-fulfillment, though, it’s not an entirely uncomplicated one. The members of the camp get restless; their enthusiasm for limitless possibility turns to dissatisfaction with their very limited present. Fights and arguments break out — at least, so we are told. We stay with Parrish, who by this time is too busy watching the children of the camp create a new city out of stones and twigs and leaves. Izzy is one of the “designers, engineers, imagineers” running the show, and it quickly becomes clear that the last of those categories is the most important. The children are filling the space left in the world with something better than the world (perhaps a polder). Inevitably, when FEMA loses patience, and decides to forcibly relocate the refugees, the city is ready and willing to take them instead — with the caveat that they have to let go of their past enough to cross the threshold. Parrish (I’m about to give the ending away) doesn’t make it (if he did, the story really would be too generous to like), but he accepts his lot without rancour. It’s enough for him to know that he might be able to get there someday. For a few moments, it’s enough for us, too.

Salon Fantastique: The Lepidopterist

When I think of Lucius Shepard’s writing, I think first of a voice. It’s a voice filled with experience and confidence, speaking in long, fluid sentences, knowing that it’s telling me a story I need to hear. It’s the voice of stories like “Barnacle Bill the Spacer” or “Jailwise“. Of course, Shepard modulates this voice according to the character using it (Senor Volto, for instance, uses almost as many long words as the narrator of either story above, but clearly to somewhat different effect), and on occasion he uses other, more colloquial voices as well. But it’s that rich, mellifluous tone I think of first when I think of Shepard, to the point where it comes as a bit of a shock to start reading “The Lepidopterist” and encounter (after a brief opening paragraph that frames the story as a transcript of a recording made thirty years ago, and the narrator we’re about to hear as “short, in his sixties, as wizened and brown as an apricot seed, and […] very drunk”) this:

I’m goin to tell you bout a storm, cause it please me to do so. You cotch me in the tellin mood, and when John Anderson McCrae get in the tellin mood, ain’t nobody on this little island better suited for the job. I been foolin with storms one way or the other since time first came to town, and this storm I goin to speak of, it ain’t the biggest, it don’t have the stiffest winds, but it bring a strange cargo to our shores.

It’s different, but well-executed. There’s still poetry here, albeit of a rougher kind than is usual for Shepard — “I been foolin with storms one way or the other since time first came to town” is a lovely, clever expression, and there are lines like it throughout the story. But while McCrae is clearly still a Shepardian storyteller, experienced and confident, to me at least he never rang as true as someone like Tommy Penhaligon or Billy Long Gone. That’s partly because I never quite got the hang of the dialect — as with any writing so stylised, you expect it to take a few pages to get acclimated, but I found myself re-reading passages even up to the end — but also, I think, a function of the relative brevity of the tale. Shepard always seems most comfortable to me with some elbow-room in his stories, but he doesn’t (arguably can’t allow himself to) have any here, and beyond being a storyteller, it’s never really clear who McCrae is. A voice is an indication of character, but also a vehicle; which is to say that what the voice says matters.

So my problem with McCrae is compounded by the fact that the plot is nothing to write home about. Indeed, if the voice is something of a departure for Shepard, the story it tells verges on being overly familiar. The trajectory is one we’ve followed before, a tale of an encounter with the fantastic: the protagonist is drawn by stages away from the consensus reality we know, is confronted by a hallucinatory vision, and dazedly withdraws into normality. This is the basic shape of Shepard stories such as “Eternity and Afterward”, “The Park Sweeper”, and “Crocodile Rock”, and even “Only Partly Here” (probably the best thing Shepard has written in the past five years, though “Over Yonder” runs it close). In “The Lepidopterist” McCrae tells how, as a youth, he worked with his father as a wrecker, drawing storm-lashed ships astray onto rocks; how on one such job they encountered Arthur Jessup, an American transporting some unusual butterflies (“Whether they the Devil’s work or one of God’s miracles, I cannot tell you,” McCrae says. “But it for certain they unusual butterflies”); how the butterflies wove silken cocoons large enough to hatch a person; and what happened next.

But at no point does “The Lepidopterist” have the astonishing intensity of a story like “Eternity and Afterward”, or, at the other end of the scale, the delicacy of a story like “Only Partly Here”. What’s left? There’s a nod to the politics of the situation in the fact that Jessup engineers McCrae’s encounter with one of the butterfly-creatures as a gift, saying that he wants to take away some of the boy’s courage for his own good. But McCrae’s subsequent assessment — “So if Mister Jessup make me a present, it were like most Yankee presents and take away more than it give” — feels oddly half-hearted. As allegory it doesn’t catch, and the sense that McCrae hasn’t lived the life he was meant for doesn’t sting as it should. So while my presumptuous guess would be that it’s the voice for which David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have picked the story up for their year’s best fantasy, I can also see why some reviews haven’t mentioned the story at all. It’s strange: McCrae’s voice is classic Shepard in a number of ways, but seems to be missing the one thing that can usually be taken for granted: a burning need to tell. I enjoyed “The Lepidopterist”, but I don’t know why it had to be told.

The Links of Al-Rassan

  • Ursula Le Guin on why adults should read children’s fantasy.
  • Also in the New Statesman, Philip Pullman (and a couple of others) on William Blake.
  • Now All Year’s Bests Until The End, courtesy of Jed Hartman.
  • Elizabeth Bear objects to her latest novel being described as slash. Sarah Monette queries current usage of the term more generally. Extensive discussion ensues.
  • Karl Schroeder interviewed at Velcro City.
  • Matt Cheney interviews Juliet Ulman.
  • Jonathan Strahan presents the Coode Street Awards.
  • Not SF, but Making Light links to all of Eddie Izzard’s Mongrel Nation.

    • Salon Fantastique: The Night Whiskey

    I got my hands on a copy of Salon Fantastique, the latest Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling anthology, a couple of days ago, and the probably-foolish idea of reading at least a story a day from the book, and writing short blog posts about them, has germinated in my head. “Short” being the operative word; if these start ballooning into 1500-word essays I’m going to start running out of time. I might write about every story in the book, I might just write about a handful, or just this one. We’ll see how it goes.

    First up (but not the first story in the book) is Jeffrey Ford’s entry, “The Night Whiskey”, which Nic singled out as one of the best stories in the book in her review, and which Jonathan Strahan has picked up for his year’s best. It’s certainly a strong story, although for me I think not quite first-rank Ford — which should be taken as praising the story with a faint damn, since Ford is so reliably good. It’s also quite interesting as “a Jeffrey Ford story”. In a (slightly rushed) piece for the LBC when Ford’s novel The Girl in the Glass was under discussion earlier this year, I tried dividing Ford’s stories into two types, loud (exuberantly fantastic) and quiet (liminal). In those terms, “The Night Whiskey” is one of the stories that don’t really fit into either category; a quiet story about someone on the edge of a loud one.

    The story is set in a small American town called Gatchfield, which would be like any other such town (“one of those places you pass but never stop in while on vacation to some National Park”) except for a unique local flora, the deathberry. Deathberry plants grow only out of dead bodies: once a year some of the townsfolk harvest them and distill the berries into the titular whiskey. There’s only enough in each harvest to produce eight shots of night whiskey, so a lottery is held to determine who gets to drink them. Winning tickets are prized, because in addition to being sufficiently intoxicating that just the one shot gets the person who consumes it blind drunk, the whiskey transports the drinker to a fugue state, or possibly an actual alternate dimension, in which they can talk with dead relatives. The protagonist, Ernest, doesn’t win the lottery, and isn’t involved in the production of the whiskey. Instead, he’s an apprentice for the drunk harvest, helping to round up the whiskey-drinkers the morning after the night before — not the easiest feat in the world, given that for some unknown reason drinkers always climb a tree before they pass out.

    Tonally, the first part of the story is surreal, even lighthearted. But there is, inevitably, a shift: a darker side to the drink is revealed. To borrow a phrase that Graham used when reviewing 20th Century Ghosts, “The Night Whiskey” is a masterclass in the rhetoric of endings. (It may not be a coincidence that, like most of Joe Hill’s work, “The Night Whiskey” is ultimately a horrific story; endings are always important, but arguably they’re essential for horror stories to work.) Details from the first part of the story are picked up and paid off; the reader’s understanding of what’s happening is stage-managed so precisely that recognition arrives barely a sentence or two ahead of the explanation (at least, that was the effect for me); and the shift in the positioning of the fantastic, with Ernest never drawn all the way into the wildest happenings at the centre of the tale, but drawn in further than we think he will be, and dealt a sort of glancing blow that reorients his life, is beautifully handled.

    My main reservation is the pacing of the opening pages, which seemed to take just a little too long to get to where they were going, without ever quite making Gatchfield either real enough or Twin Peaks enough to compensate. Thinking about it, I would also have liked, just this once, the articulation of the story’s theme to carry a bit more force. The idea — that Gatchfield is a town in unnatural stasis, and the deathberry and its consequences are a sort of re-assertion of a natural law of change — resonates strongly with me, and forms the basis of the ending. Ernest and his girlfriend escape to “the biggest brightest city” they can find, where “Every day there was change and progress and crazy news on the television”. That seems to me a neat inversion of a common fantasy arc, and it deserved to stand on slightly more solid ground, to have more to balance it than the theorising of an eccentric doctor.

    Vector 249 — Articles Online

    To start the week, here are some articles from the most recent Vector. “Storying Lives” was the loose theme; Gary K. Wolfe’s essay, “Framing the Unframeable“, takes a broad look of that theme in the context of sf:

    When one looks at the published memoirs and autobiographical sketches written by science fiction and fantasy authors, mostly for the benefit of their fans – the sort of thing collected in Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison’s Hell’s Cartographers (1975) or Martin Greenberg’s Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science Fiction Writers (1981) – one is initially struck by the relative thinness and lack of genuine introspection of many of the essays. Typically, such pieces read as a variety of Augustinian conversion tales, depicting a precocious childhood, often solitary and bookish, sometimes sickly, sometimes featuring battles with parents to get into the adult sections of the library, and characteristically leading toward a moment of revelation: “And then came Hugo Gernsback” (Alfred Bester) [1] “Then I saw and bought an issue of something called Amazing Stories” (Damon Knight) [2] “So science fiction entered into and began warping my life from an early age” (Brian Aldiss) [3] etc. In one of the still-comparatively rare autobiographies of SF writers, Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction, Jack Williamson ends a chapter with the following cliffhanger:

    Something else happened, however, in the spring of 1926, the first year I was out of high school. Something that changed my life. Hugo Gernsback launched a new pulp magazine, filled with reprinted stories by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and A. Merritt and Edgar Rice Burroughs, stories he called “scientifiction.”

    The magazine was Amazing Stories. [4]

    Following these road-to-Damascus moments, however, these memoirs and autobiographies seldom become genuine testaments, instead amounting to not much more than narrative resumés, filled with anecdotes of encounters with fellow writers and editors and often with almost obsessively detailed accounts of sales figures and payments; one comes away with the sense that (a) science fiction writers all clearly remember the first SF story they read, and (b) they keep really good tax records.

    While Graham Sleight considers storying some genres:

    I have to say, in general, that debates about the definition of sf (or fantasy, or horror) don’t exercise me very much – though of course that may reflect a lack of rigour on my part. I am quite taken by Samuel Delany’s view that we should not try to define genres – because, for instance, definition inevitably means concentrating on boundary cases at the expense of the core of the genre, because it sets up a target which critics and writers can game, and so on. But there are plenty of people who do try to define sf in radically differing ways, and I thought it might be useful to try and sort some of those ways out.

    And in “Founded on the Shambles“, Paul Kincaid discusses Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”:

    ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ breaks every rule. There are no named characters, indeed no real characters at all. There is no story, at least in the sense that we follow characters through a series of incidents and events towards a climax. There are only two lines of dialogue, unconnected to each other, in the entire piece. There isn’t even much in the way of authorial certainty: ‘I do not know the rules and laws of their society’ (274) she confesses at one point, and at another, having listed some of their technologies, she retreats: ‘Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it’ (275). And the very subject of the story, that which gives it its title, appears only in the very last paragraph.

    We don’t read ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ because of these storytelling quirks, but because these storytelling quirks throw the theme of the story so much into focus.

    Meanwhile, in reviews, Lesley A. Hall tackles Julie Phillips’ Tiptree biography:

    Biography is a form in which perfection always lies beyond the possibility of achievement. However, Julie Phillips’ biography of Alice Bradley Sheldon, the complex and troubled woman best known to science fiction readers as James Tiptree Jr (with a subsidiary fictive literary identity as Racoona Sheldon, reclusive former schoolteacher), is about as good as it gets.

    Gary Dalkin considers Rainbows End:

    Central to all this is enigmatic cyber entity ‘Rabbit’, who may be one of the established characters in the novel, an AI, or, well… and herein lies the major flaw of Rainbows End. Much is made of not knowing who might be behind what persona on-line, so that as with the on-line world today Vinge’s protagonists may ultimately never know what is really going on. Which might be realistic, but leaves a plot riddled with absurdly improbable coincidences for want of the twist, the revelation, the narrative U-turn, which would tie the disparate yet interconnected narrative threads together in a convincing way. The result is a sprawling, highly imaginative novel in which all the many elements fail to resolve into a satisfying whole.

    And L.J. Hurst discusses Desperate Moon:

    Heidel’s two admitted influences are Ellison and Ray Bradbury, and they stand out, because if you like Bradbury you’ll like the mixture to be found here. On the other hand you will not find much advance on what Ray Bradbury was doing in mixing fantasies and horror stories in his collections in the 1950s. You will also find some stories remind you of other works within sf (‘The Thing-In-The-Back-Yard’ is reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘The Father-Thing’, for example) and outside of it (‘Dead Drunk’, in which a character meets Death, echoes Woody Allen’s sketch ‘Getting Even’).

    While I’m at it, I should note that the Matrix website has also been updated. New content there includes Lon S. Cohen on fan-made films, Richard Matthews on an adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition, and Martin McGrath on season two of Battlestar Galactica:

    BSG does two very rare things. First, it recognises that while politics is messy, annoying and full of political differences that may be forever intractable, the democratic political process remains crucial to any kind of good society. And, second, it asks the viewer to do a very difficult thing – to like and respect those with whom you fundamentally disagree. BSG contains characters and plot elements that can resonate with or infuriate those on both the left and the right, yet it almost never collapses into a cosy centralism that imagines that everything would be better if people could forget their principles and “just get along”.

    Show’s Over

    Here’s an interview with M. John Harrison by Iain Emsley. Of interest, given China Mieville’s recent comments about the New Weird and British Boom in Locus:

    There’s been a lot spoken about post-Seattle fiction, especially by China. Do you see this as in fact happening or is it part of a cycle in literature?

    Category-making is an exercise of control. When anything out of the ordinary happens in a genre, an entire immune system of activists–reviewers, bloggers, academics, pseudo-academics, anthologisers, editors, marketeers, piggybackers and other opportunists–rushes to manage, exploit and contain the outbreak by defining it in established categorical and historical terms. Where it centres on the appearance of a young writer, it’s less a discourse than the kind of grooming done by paedophiles. One of its effects is to absorb the other safely into the self and keep the genre’s economics churning. The New Weird started as a joke but rapidly became a way of making an intervention in that process, baiting the immune system a little, bringing it into public view. For me it meant one thing (to name is to claim, and if I have to be claimed then it will be by myself), for China it meant another: but we shared enough goals to have fun. We’ve moved on now, and for us the joke’s over.

    I believe that Tachyon are planning a New Weird anthology for next year. Gotta admire the timing.

    (Also, it seems pleasingly apt that the Wikipedia page for New Weird has a note at the top saying “The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed” …)

    EDIT: Since WordPress apparently hates Martin today, I get to point out the links he recovered from archive.org: one, two, three. A prize to anyone who can locate thread four.