- Paul Raven started a debate about publishing online: sf magazines don’t have to die. One of the things that fed into it was Jason Stoddard’s thoughts on new marketing 101 for sf publishers and writers, which he subsequently followed up with a second post (which takes us back in the direction of the author-reader relationship again). Meanwhile, Big Dumb Object remembers Bruce Sterling’s talk at the last BSFA/SFF AGM event, and Gordon van Gelder responded to Paul’s original post on the Nightshade forums, sparking another thread of discussion (telling quote from Daryl Gregory: “It’s interesting that people here see techies as natural screen readers, but not SF fans. Everybody outside the ghetto would assume that SF folks would be first in line. I mean, online.”)
- Speaking of content from print magazines online, F&SF has essays on Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman, Michael Swanwick, and Michael Andrei-Driussi. While the Matrix team have put up Tom Hunter’s interview with Josh Conviser, and Martin McGrath’s review of Children of Men.
- And a new online magazine: Darker Matter. Which, among other things, appears to have unearthed a Douglas Adams interview from 1979
- Adam Roberts on Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future.
- Nic Clarke on Mary Gentle’s Ilario.
- James Wood comprehensively not getting Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day; a partial response.
- Michel Faber on Jed Mercurio’s Ascent, which looks fascinating.
- Kim Stanley Robinson has been verging on ubiquitous this week, which has the effect of making me want to read Sixty Days of Counting even more than I already did. There are brief pieces at Salon and in the UCSD Guardian, an interview at Sci-Fi Weekly, and sundry radio and podcast appearances.
- Bookslut interviews Scarlett Thomas (whose The End of Mr Y I also want to read; hurry up, UK publication).
- And finally, for those going to Contemplation, a more-or-less final programme is online.
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Why is that you don’t think Wood got Against the Day? I haven’t read the novel so I wonder.
Thr ‘Conversational Reading’ blog nails it, I think: Wood has coined this phrase ‘hysterical realism’ (which means, roughly, big sprawly postmodern novels) as the ne plus ultra of what is wrong with contemporary writing. He’s a Modernist at heart; he likes Mann and Proust and James and so on. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Postmodern fiction is too playful to engage his genuine sympathies as a reader, but not playful enough (or too stenuously done) to entertain him as a jeu d’espirit. De gustibus, I suppose. Personally I think he’s dead wrong; and this review shows him trying really really hard to avoid admitting that Against the Day is a stone cold masterpiece; he can’t admit that (although that’s clearly what the book is) because that would invalidate his general critical perspective.
In his essay on Gene Wolf, Michael Swanwick writes “you should be aware that I have a long history of creating clever theories that turn out to be wrong, so take this one with a grain of salt.” Swanwick is writing about a particular theory of his about Wolfe’s writing, but he could just as easily be talking about his own fiction. It occurs to me that that “take this one with a grain of salt” attitude sums up a lot of the best modern sf, slipstream, new weird, interstitial, whatever you want to call it these days. Sf as the tall tale, with a wink to the reader.