Year: 2009

Ten Things I Want From The Locus Blog

Martin draws my attention to this post by Liza Groen Trombi at the recently-launched Locus Roundtable blog, and this quote in particular:

While most have welcomed the blog and the launch discussion, we have clearly annoyed a few people by not conforming to their ideas of what we ought to be doing. I’m sure this blog will be many things in its time, and all in all I’m very pleased to have it up and running.

I’m among those to have found the “2008 in review” discussion much less time-worthy than I would have expected, though I would describe myself as more frustrated than annoyed; a Locus blog should be a good, interesting and useful thing, but what we’ve had so far has been those things only in brief flashes. But what do I think they should be doing? Well:

  1. Not moderating comments. There has already been some discussion on this point, but at present the fact that every comment is moderated, and that it takes hours for said comments to be approved and appear on the blog, makes something of a mockery of the idea of actual discussion, and is thus rather a disincentive to commenting at all.
  2. Showing complete posts on the blog home page. I can’t be the only one who finds the current brief snippets and “read more” view irritating; I’ve already come to your blog, don’t make me click through to a separate page for every post, please. (If there’s a good reason to hide something — spoilers, for instance — then fine, but I see no reason to make it standard.) On the upside, the full text is syndicated, so I can read it all as long as I don’t actually visit the blog … but of course, that’s another way of driving me away from engaging in discussion.
  3. Discussing specific works of sf. As Jeff VanderMeer pointed out, the paucity of such discussion was (bizarrely, given the people involved) a problem with many of the 2008-in-review posts. But more generally, this is surely something Locus is very strong at, and while I appreciate that most of the contributors’ thoughts about books will be channelled into reviews for the print magazine, I’ve never yet written a review that manages to say everything there is to say about a good book (particularly when writing in a word-limited context). (Actually, there’s something else I’m not clear on: now that the blog exists, will the posting of sample reviews from the print magazine cease and desist? I think it would be nice if it continued.)
  4. Demonstrating awareness of a world beyond Locus. God bless Graham, who is so far the only person to link to anything of substance beyond the Locusosphere, and even linked here! (Paul Witcover did manage some Amazon links, I suppose.) The rest of the posts seem to exist in a sort of splendid isolation, though.
  5. Interacting with said world. This is, surely, part of what blogs are for. Lord knows I’m not always the best at this myself — I frequently find myself contemplating a post in response to something elsewhere, only to find myself without time to write the damn thing, and reduced to lumping it into a link round-up — but it would seem more worthwhile to go over to the Roundtable and post a comment and wait for said comment to appear if there was an indication that they had any interest in listening to what other people are saying.
  6. Providing critical commentary — the history, theory and practice of sf (and fantasy) criticism. This is what they’ve done best so far, up to and including Graham’s post about advocacy and recognition in sf. More please.
  7. Providing publishing commentary. This should be another area a Locus blog could excel in, in part on the news front (I’m sure I’m not the only person to make a beeline for the “books sold” and “books delivered” listings in each issue), but more relevantly for the Roundtable, I would have thought, in terms of commentary — Locus has a unique perspective on the sf market.
  8. Providing other commentary relevant or of interest to the sf community. Which is, basically, code for allowing the bloggers elbow room to talk about whatever catches their fancy.
  9. Failing all of the above, setting up an “about” page wouldn’t be a bad idea. At the moment, there’s just a link from the Locus home-page, with no explanation of what the Roundtable is or what it exists to do; so it’s perhaps not surprising that people have formed opinions about what it should be doing. A line somewhere along the lines of “The staff of Locus discuss X, Y and Z” would do it.
  10. Last but not least, they should be posting pictures of the Locus cat. If there is one. Because, as is well known, no blog is complete without cat-pictures.

If you detect a subtext in my list to the effect that I think they should be writing a blog that’s a bit more like Torque Control, well, there’s probably an element of truth in that; I try to maintain the sort of blog I want to read, after all. But it also boils down to this: a Locus blog, it seems to me, should be the first online stop for intelligent commentary on sf literature and related topics and at present, unfortunately, I don’t think it is. Fingers crossed for the future, though.

Best Graphic Story

There’s a new Hugo category this year, Best Graphic Story, which means I can stop nominating graphic novels in Best Related Book. I can’t claim a huge knowledge of the field, but I have read some stories released in 2008 which I think are award-worthy. (As to whether they are eligible, that’s a bit trickier – I am counting it as a 2008 work if a story arc or miniseries was concluded, or released as a collected graphic novel.)

Invincible Iron Man: The Five Nightmares
Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca
Writing the first big Iron Man series to come out after the film isn’t an easy task: how do you ease the film fans into the character’s extensive continuity without either overwhelming them with backstory or ignoring the past storylines? Matt Fraction’s first arc on Invincible Iron Man does a pretty good job. The five nightmares of the title refer to Tony’s greatest fears, that the Iron Man armour becomes cheap, disposable, and available to someone else, a thoroughly modern threat to deal with, although at the end the big showdown with the villain is another “two guys in power armour have a big punchup”. My main issue is with the artwork, which looks great when it’s a metal suit, and not so great when it’s real people – everyone is strangely shiny, and I’m not sure what’s going on with Pepper’s face on this page. Still, this is a fun action-filled comic with a high level of things exploding, and Larroca’s art is definitely suited to that.

All-Star Superman
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
I’m not a big Superman fan – he just never seemed that interesting compared to Batman, or most other superheroes. He’s too powerful, too upstanding, a bit too dull. Which makes it even more impressive that I like All-Star Superman as much as I do. Maybe because it barrels through the origin story in a single page, and gets down to business, which in this case is Supes flying next to the sun and saving astronauts from a mutant creature which is going to explode. The ideas get bigger and madder from there on, and since this is not bound by the main DC continuity anything really can happen. The art is good but the colours are even better – it’s bright and primary-coloured and fits a character who wears a blue suit and is powered by the sun.

Abe Sapien: The Drowning
Mike Mignola and Jason Shawn Alexander
A solo outing for Abe Sapien, his first mission alone, to find a mysterious dagger last seen embedded in the chest of a mysterious warlock off the coast of a small strange island. Yes, it is another Hellboy-universe story where some weird supernatural shit happens, and there’s not so much that we haven’t seen before, but it’s a well-done story about weird supernatural shit. Alexander’s style is very different to what you get from Mignola, plus it has a zeppelin and creppy little monks, and watching the younger Abe feel his way through his uncertainty on the way to becoming the confident character of later years gives it a twist on your standard Hellboy smack-it-in-the-face approach.

Hellboy: Darkness Calls
Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo
Back to the story arc for Hellboy after a few standalones, and this is pretty continuity-heavy if you haven’t read the previous volumes. The Baba-Yaga is still upset that Hellboy shot out her eye in 1964, so she drags him into her world based on Russian folklore and traditions of the past. Then he fights a guy who can’t die and makes a lot of wisecracks, and this is volume 8 so you know the drill. Mignola wrote this but didn’t draw it, and while Duncan Fegredo’s art is pretty good when he’s drawing a simpler scene, the fight scenes are a bit busy (and there’s a lot of fighting in this one).

Penny Arcade
Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulic
So technically this is a webcomic about video games, but it’s quite surreal and fantastic at times, especially with strips like The Fangspire (man fights giant bird) and fantasy stories within the story like the Songs of Sorcelation, and it is the comic which has most consistently made me laugh this year so I think it’s worthy of a nomination. The question of what to nominate is trickier – my favourite storyline is Paint the Line, which is alternate history if you squint a bit, but the collection released this year was The Case of the Mummy’s Gold, and that’s what I’ll go for.

If you want more ideas, the Comic Book Resources Best of 2008 list recaps their favourites of the year.

Dollhouse: “Ghost”

Scattered thoughts on this:

1) The biggest surprise, I think, is the tone, which is very different to all of Whedon’s other TV shows. There are almost no overt jokes (indeed, the most Xander/Wash-like character is described in the casting notes as someone “whose talents exceed his morals”), and the whole episode reeks of unease, and not just in the new-show-finding-its-feet way. The show’s premise — set within an organisation that reprograms beautiful young women and men (“actives”) to meet the needs of exclusive clients — unavoidably draws your attention to, and makes you question, what it is you’re enjoying about what you’re seeing, and why.

2) That, of course, is what’s not a surprise about Dollhouse — it was clear from the first announcement of the show that the whole thing was going to be a metaphor for how social roles are imposed on everyone — but I’m impressed that they made as much as they did of the tension between exploitation and empowerment offered by glossy action-adventure TV. When Echo takes on a new assignment, she’s essentially being transformed into the omnicompetent protagonist of a new show (and I did appreciate that what Whedon chose to showcase in the pilot is a thinking protagonist), but the constant, nagging undercurrent that refuses to let you embrace events on the screen is that the whole thing is a dishonest fantasy.

3) The trajectory for the first few episodes at least is plainly going to be Echo discovering her own identity, which could water down that tension somewhat; but a more immediate problem is that until that happens, Dollhouse is a show with no central character. This had sort of occurred to me beforehand, but it’s one thing to think about it academically, and another thing to see it on screen. At the moment, Echo is a blank. We get a couple of glimpses of the person she was before signing up for the Dollhouse (something she clearly did out of desperation), and one of the sub-plots of “Ghost” is the induction of a new Active into the team, so we get a sense of how Echo’s origin story might have looked, but other than one moment of inquisitiveness, there’s no sense of her, right now, as a person in her own right — which of course contributes to the unsettling nature of the episode.

4) I guess the question I’m circling around is, what on Earth does Whedon thinks is going to bring a mass audience back for a second episode? Dollhouse doesn’t even have a clear style of its own at this stage — while I think there’s a decent chance I could recognise a frame from one of his other shows on the basis of the lighting and framing, and I know I can recognise the score music, this seemed much more generic. (The Dollhouse itself looks a bit like Wolfram and Hart’s office in season five of Angel, for instance.)

5) This is not to say I didn’t like it; I did, or perhaps more accurately, I was intrigued by it. Though apparently set in the present Dollhouse is, in a way that even Firefly was not, actual science fiction. Nic called it a thought experiment, and I think that’s right, to the extent that that’s the level you on which you have to buy into it in order to want to watch more. Given I often read on the level of idea, rather than character or story, that’s not a problem for me — I want to see Whedon’s takes on all the problems of identity that this sort of sf traditionally deals with; one thing that strikes me, for instance, is that given Doll technology exists, there is a level on which none of the characters can be trusted to be who they appear to be, which could, if Whedon and the other writers want, make Dollhouse an even more destabilizing show to watch than it already is — but I’m only too aware that most other people don’t consume narrative in that way.

6) Judged purely as a single episode of TV? It was OK. None of the cast amazed me, though Dushku was better than I’d expected. In principle I approve of the fact that it’s “Remote-free TV“, but in practice I’m not sure it made the best possible use of the additional minutes; indeed it felt a little slow at times. I liked the little moment of dissonance when Echo-as-negotiator claims “I’ve been doing this all my life”, and I appreciate that her force of personality is meant to outweigh the obvious incongruousness of someone so young making such a claim, but I’m not sure it quite came off. And the choice of an abduction/abuse plot was perhaps a little more heavy-handed than was required; in a way something more obviously glossy might have been more effective.

7) So yes, it’s doomed. Half a dozen episodes, maybe? But I’ll watch them all, and hope that I’m wrong. I enjoy, and think I understand, the grammar of a Joss Whedon TV show more than is the case with most other TV; as is perhaps obvious from the fact that I’ve written this post at all.

8) Of course, I could just be over-thinking it.

2009 Arthur C Clarke Award Submissions

Spring! And a young fan’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of the Arthur C Clarke Award. This year’s shortlist is due to be announced in mid-March, but for the first time the Award is officially announcing the list of submitted works, and very generously they’ve decided to do it through Torque Control. Administrator Tom Hunter writes:

The Arthur C. Clarke Award was originally created to celebrate science fiction literature at its best. One of the things that most struck me when I became the Award’s administrator was the volume of creative and original talent we were seeing submitted every year.

Speculation and active debate have always surrounded the announcements of the shortlists and the eventual winner. By announcing the full list of eligible books for the first time I hope we can also highlight the strength and diversity of current science fiction, create more conversation and debate and show the awesome challenge that faces the judging panel every year.

And so, without further ado, here are the submitted books:

Clarke submissions 2009

This image is deliberately tiny because last year, certain people had too much fun reverse-engineering a list of submissions from a similar picture, and have indicated that they would like to play the game again. Far be it from me to stand in the way of people having fun, so: have at it!


(For everyone else, I’ll update the post with a proper-sized image and the full list later.

Here you go, all forty-six books, in alphabetical order by author:

The Ashes of Worlds by Kevin J Anderson (Simon & Schuster)
Line War by Neal Asher (Tor)
The Heritage by Will Ashon (Faber & Faber)
Man in the Dark by Paul Auster (Faber & Faber)
Neuropath by Scott Bakker (Gollancz)
Matter by Iain M Banks (Orbit)
Flood by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz)
Weaver by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz)
City at the End of Time by Greg Bear (Gollancz)
Kethani by Eric Brown (Solaris)
Necropath by Eric Brown (Solaris)
Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey (Picador)
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (HarperCollins)
Incandescence by Greg Egan (Gollancz)
Infoquake by David Louis Edelman (Solaris)
The Broken World by Tim Etchells (William Heinemann)
Omega by Christopher Evans (PS Publishing)
Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)
Principles of Angels by Jaine Fenn (Gollancz)
Eve: The Empyrean Age by Tony Gonzales (Gollancz)
The Temporal Void by Peter F Hamilton (Macmillan)
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann)
Template by Matthew Hughes (PS Publishing)
The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt (Harvill Secker)
Song of Time by Ian R MacLeod (PS Publishing)
The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann (Snowbooks)
The Quiet War by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
Dark Blood by John Meaney (Gollancz)
The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan (Gollancz)
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (Walker)
Debatable Space by Philip Palmer (Orbit)
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)
Swiftly by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
Going Under by Justina Robson (Gollancz)
The Last Colony by John Scalzi (Tor)
DogFellow’s Ghost by Gavin Smith (Macmillan)
Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Atlantic)
The Dog of the North by Tim Stretton (Macmillan)
Halting State by Charles Stross (Orbit)
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (Orbit)
The Margarets by Sheri S Tepper (Gollancz)
Blue War by Jeffrey Thomas (Solaris)
Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber (Tor)
Martin Martin’s on the Other Side by Mark Wernham (Jonathan Cape)
Winterstrike by Liz Williams (Tor)

As I posted in the thread below: 13% of this year’s submissions are by women, and 17% are ‘mainstream’ in origin, both figures down slightly (I think) from the last few years. And as Nick asks: what would your shortlist be?

Today’s Free Book

Is The Heritage by Will Ashon, who reports that:

So, the good burghers of Faber & Faber have decided against publishing a mass-market paperback edition of “The Heritage”. I would’ve been pissed off, anyway, I guess, but I think would have understood this hard-headed business decision. After all, if you wanna kiss the ring of the Leather Pope then corporate capitalism’s where it’s at and fuck any of the considerations (art, literature, quality) you may pay lip service to. But I think my sense of fair play was piqued by being told less than two weeks before said paperback edition was supposed to be out. I mean, really, how shit is that? Sorry? Pardon? What was that I heard about putting authors first? Anyway, as the only way left to me to build any sort of a readership for what I think is a pretty good book (not a great book by any means, but not as bad as a lot of the shit out there), I’m posting it here for you to download. The file is only 853.5 KB and it downloads as a pdf direct from this link.

There are reviews here by Colin Greenland and here by Martin Lewis. I haven’t read it yet — indeed, I now feel slightly guilty for not having got to my dead-tree copy yet — but I liked Ashon’s first novel, Clear Water, and this sounds like it has similar virtues. So, as the man says, give it a go.

In Link Waters

Well, here I am at Montreal airport, waiting for my flight home. Time for some overdue links:

And now it’s time to board the plane, so time for me to sign off.

War in SF

Even all the snow ever can’t stop the new Vector getting through, it seems:

Torque Control — editorial
Letters — from Anna Feruglio Dal Dan and Martin Lewis
HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds as a controlling metaphor for the twentieth century — Stephen Baxter
The Menace of War: Einstein, Freud and SF by James Holden
After Heinlein: Politics in Scalzi’s Green Soldier Universe by Martin McGrath
The Flowers of War — Nick Hubble considers The Carhullan Army
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Kari Sperring
Transmission, Interrupted — a TV column by Saxon Bullock
Foundation Favourites: Memoirs of a Spacewoman — Andy Sawyer
Resonances: Hitler Wins — Stephen Baxter
The New X: Wings of Song — Graham Sleight

It’s a big issue — twelve pages more than usual! — but as noted in the editorial, I also recommend the following supplementary reading:

Wild Hearts in Uniform — Gwyneth Jones
Denvention 3 Guest of Honour Speech — Lois McMaster Bujold

Letters to the usual address; and, as ever, if your copy doesn’t arrive in a timely fashion, let us know. Otherwise, apologies for the quiet period around here — very busy with the day job at the moment, and I’m off to Montreal (for all of 48 hours!) tomorrow.

London Meeting: Michael Swanwick

The guest at tonight’s BSFA London Meeting is Michael Swanwick, who will be interviewed by Roz Kaveney.

As usual, the venue is the upstairs room of The Antelope, 22 Eaton Terrace, London, SW1W 8EZ. The closest tube station is Sloane Square, and a map is here.

The meeting is free (although there will be a raffle, with sf books as prizes), and any and all are welcome. The interview will start at 7pm, although there’ll be people in the bar from 6 onwards.

Unwritten

Things I would totally write posts about if I weren’t spending all my time either playing Final Fantasy XII or keeping up with commitments elsewhere, a partial list:

1. Survivors. Watched the final episode last night; I’ve seen the odd post about the series, but did anyone else watch it through to the end? I was much more impressed than not, I have to say. I’m not keen on the Secret Conspiracy, which makes me wary of the second series, since it looks set to play a greater part in the story than it has done so far; and sometimes the plots are a mite predictable. But sometimes they’re not, and I think all the central characters are well-realised. And I’m a sucker for community- and society-building stories, anyway.

2. The return of Battlestar Galactica. While I empathize with reactions like Abigail’s, in that I invariably find that reading what the people making Galactica have to say about it diminishes my enjoyment, if I ignore what they’re saying I can still find much to appreciate. In the first episode of season four round two, for instance, I didn’t much care for the manner in which the reval that ended the episode was handled — clumsy, I thought — but I do like the reveal itself. I like that, this time, it has a greater weight for the previously-revealed cylons than for the humans; I like that the the relationship it references becomes a model for the whole human-cylon relationship (particularly given what we appeared to learn elsewhere in the episode about the relationship between the populations of the twelve colonies and the skinjob cylons). I’m glad that it doesn’t invalidate major character development. And I also find it satisfying, in a perverse way, that I found it initially disappointing, and only found things to appreciate on reflection, because it seems to me that disappointment was an effective way of mirroring the series characters’ disappointment at the end of the previous episode in the audience. I don’t believe for a second that the makers intended that effect — I can’t have that much faith in TV showrunners — but I think it’s there nonetheless.

3. Further adventures in Theory. I’ve still got comments on the previous threads I should respond to, and indeed it’s not like I’ve read much more of the book yet (see above re: Final Fantasy and other commitments). But at the moment I am wrestling with Structuralism. As related, I am not convinced by some of the arguments for the creational power of language (I don’t think we divide the spectrum into individual colours entirely arbitrarily, purely as a matter of language; I think we divide it up the way we do because certain physical phenomena filters light into particular bands of wavelengths, and it is useful to have words for those bands), and I find some of the examples of structralist criticism given to get a bit, er, abstract. But at the same time I am sympathetic to the idea of a mode of criticism that is about relating texts to larger structures — not surprisingly, since I buy into Damien Broderick’s concept of the sf megatext (at least as I understand it from reading discussions of the concept), even if it does take me away from the text I start with.

4. Reading, and particularly reading of shortlists, as social behaviour; although on this one I’m not sure I have anything to add, so much as I want to point it out as a concise statement of something I am often conscious of. The urge to write reviews, in this model, is something of a totalitarian impulse, an urge to make, or at least persuade, people to talk about what you’re interested in talking about. (So is there an extent to which I approve of the BSFA novel shortlist because it consists largely of things I’ve already read? Maybe.)