Since Vector 251 has started arriving (and as Peter notes, confirmations that it’s arrived are appreciated), here’s the table of contents. No colour cover this time, but there is a spiffy design by Gabe Chouinard:

Torque Control — editorial
Fantastic Cities — a discussion between Michael Swanwick, Jeffrey Ford, Ian R. Macleod and Claire Weaver
To Travel Hopefully — Stephen Baxter on the novels of Nevil Shute
The Human as Alien — Ken MacLeod’s Guest of Honour talk from last year’s Novacon
Leibniz’s Fix-Ups — Adam Roberts on Stephen Baxter and the nature of sf
Skin Deep Fiction — James Bacon interviews Anton Marks
“… a million Clutes screaming ‘Haecceity!’…” — discussion about the BSFA non-fiction Award
Archipelago: Long Live The UK SF Scene — by Niall Harrison
The New X: The Dark Side of the Boom — by Graham Sleight

You may notice the absence of reviews from this issue: that’s because the schedule has slipped slightly, and we’re trying to play catch-up. Issue 252 will have reviews as normal (and possibly even Particles).

In the meantime, I’m hoping this issue will generate some comment — in particular on the non-fiction Award. The discussion in this issue is an edited-down version of the comments here and here, which covered a lot of useful ground, but it would be great to have opinions from as wide a range of people as possible. So, you know what to do.

Of course, there are also new issues of Matrix and Focus, both of which look particularly fine this time around (I haven’t read them cover-to-cover yet); congratulations in particular to Martin McGrath on his first issue as editor of Focus.

It’s really long past due that I put some content from Vector 250 online, particularly since reports are that the next mailing (complete with Award ballots) is on its way. So, here’s some Saturday reading.

In a one-off revival of his “Behind the Scenes” column, Peter Weston looks at the start of the BSFA:

The very first fans – people like you and me, who loved reading and talking about science fiction – popped up in Britain almost as soon as the early SF magazines crossed the Atlantic in the late 1920s, and by 1937 there were enough of them to hold the world’s very first science fiction convention in Leeds, which attracted over twenty people! They voted to set up the Science Fiction Association (SFA), which was rather optimistically ‘devoted to the stimulation of interest in science fiction and scientific progress.’ Unfortunately the SFA lasted little more than two years and had to be disbanded at the outbreak of war.

Somewhat closer to the present, Andrew M. Butler — in “Boom Fizz”, one of a number of retrospective pieces by former editors — looks back on ten years of Vector:

I walked into a PhD on PKD, and started going to academic conferences. Perhaps the weirdest of these was one in Warwick on Virtual Futures, in about 1995, where I met Istvan Csiscery-Ronay for the first time. (He claims we met in 1992, when he gave a paper at Reading, but that can’t have been me. Perhaps the twin from the other universe was passing through, but he’d long since given up on science fiction.) Istvan, part of the team that edits Science Fiction Studies, was excited about a number of British writers, including Gwyneth Jones, whom he got to meet that weekend, and Jeff Noon. He already had the sense that Something Was Going On, or his palate was already jaded by American sf.

It was not long after that that I became co-editor of features with Gary S. Dalkin, and one of the things we were keen to do was to take British sf seriously – we knew we were the British Association of Science Fiction rather than the Association of British Science Fiction, so to speak, but we were still aware of the nationality. I guess part of this was practical, since British authors were more getatable; this was pre-Blog, barely post-email. This didn’t mean we’d give British writers an easy ride, but we would give them a ride.

Graham Sleight’s column this issue takes a look at where we are now:

First, in North America – its homeland as a self-conscious genre – science fiction is in relative but not absolute decline. Looking at Locus‘s figures for original books published in the US, about 250 original sf novels have been published per year since 1990. Fantasy, by contrast, was at about 250 a year in 1990, and is now closer to 400. This is reflected in, for instance, the Hugo results: before Robert Charles Wilson’s superb Spin won the Hugo this year, the last time a widely-acclaimed science fiction novel won that award was Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky in 2000. Other wins have either been fantasy novels (Harry Potter, Strange & Norrell) or best explained by the circumstances of a particular Worldcon.

In First Impressions, Paul Kincaid reviews Hav by Jan Morris:

It is a book suffused with a sense of loss, a prolonged and exquisite lament for the passing of a world. Although there are lots of names in the book, lots of people that ‘Jan’ encounters during her stay, there are few real characters, but the character of Hav itself is huge and overwhelming. I cannot think of a single fantasy writer who could not learn from this book how to give depth and solidity to a place by the patient accumulation of detail: the way the market operates, the unique Havian fruit of snow raspberries, the extraordinary roof race, the old woman living in seclusion who still recalls when Hav was a summer retreat for Tsarist aristocracy, the curious architecture of the Chinese tower in the old town. And on and on and on, by the end you understand why some readers of the original novel believed it described a real place.

And Tony Keen looks at Emperor by Stephen Baxter:

It’s not always a good idea for historians to read novels set in periods they’re familiar with. However thorough the author’s research, the historian’s view of what actually happened is unlikely to entirely coincide. Best to go with the author’s flow, regardless of disagreements on issues of interpretation.

So, when I read Stephen Baxter’s previous Romano-British excursion, Coalescent, I put aside finding implausible a Cotswolds villa-owning family not speaking Latin as their first language, or having connections with troops on Hadrian’s Wall. I let Baxter take me through his version of Roman Britain’s end.

But sometimes the author pushes the historian too far, and that, sadly, is the case with Emperor.

And here I thought everyone was looking forward to The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. From comments at TEV:

No super-heroes in this one, right? ‘Cause if there are, you know, I’m out.

Seriously, I have been a fan — fairly, fan; not connoisseur or scholar or anything so sophisticated — of Chabon’s since I by chance picked up the first paperback edition of “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” back in 1902, or whenever it was. It is heartening to read that he retains his gift for near-corporeal simile and metaphor; it is frightening to read that he is now putting them all in one paragraph.

I’m going to go out on a limb: I say, in advance of reading no more than just this one paragraph, he’s yellow-dogged this one. Mind you, I don’t want him to, I’m not after any hero-takes-a-fall sensationalism. I merely, as they say, got a feeling. Tell me I’m wrong, I’ll be happy.

[…]

I think he’s of late become sort of a caricature of himself. Occupational hazard maybe, for a successful, prize-winning novelist who sort of got genre-slammed. I mean, his work started as quite a bit more stable, less big-idea-centric and has sort of swiftly bogged down in the consistently fantastical. I don’t think it’s irredeemable, but it’s notable. I mean his screenwriting career alone is starting to sound like the pitch for a Charlie Kaufman script. That said, he’s a supremely talented writer. One of the best American writers currently publishing.

Nic and Victoria at Eve’s Alexandria are going to review the Clarke Award shortlist, book by book. First up: Streaking by Brian Stableford. It would be fair to say they are underwhelmed.

I’m glad that Nic quoted the short passage about Canny Kilcannon’s large ham and mushroom pizza: it was the first (of many) points at which I closed Streaking by Brian Stableford, blinked, and sighed. In disbelief. My dear Clarke judges, what were you thinking about? Heavy-handed prose, stilted dialogue, two-dimensional characters, forced thematics and a blatant thread of misogyny – it’s all here.

Enjoy.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned reading the transcript of a 1979 guest of honour speech by Christopher Priest, in an old issue of Vector. Chris has generously allowed me to put the text of the speech, “Meetings With Remarkable Men”, up on the Vector website. As noted last time around, it touches on the state of sf and the state of sf criticism; as Jed Hartman recently noted, in some senses there’s nothing new under the sun in these debates, but it’s still well worth reading the full speech. Here’s another quote to tempt you:

You have probably heard Heinlein’s remark that writers are competing for the readers’ beer-money. […] [This attitude] crops up all over the place, in articles in fanzines, in interviews with writers, in criticism. Boiled down to its essence, it says: “We are but entertainers, and entertainment is a humble trade. Therefore our sights are set low.” I believe that entertainment is a high art, and should be treated as such. Everyone at the convention today is here because we believe that science fiction is a stimulating, radical and entertaining form of literature, yet by their very words the Poul Andersons and Robert A Heinleins are asking you to settle for less.

The parts of the essay that discuss criticism also chime with recent debates over at urban drift.