Author: Niall

Restate My Assumptions

So, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, one of the things I’m reading at the moment is Beginning Theory by Peter Barry. In the first chapter, he lays out “a series of propositions which I think many traditional critics would, on the whole, subscribe to, if they were in the habit of making their assumptions explicit”, under the banner of “liberal humanism”; and then, later, lays out five core assumptions which describe “the basic frame of mind which theory embodies”. I thought it might be interesting to go through both lists and note down my initial — unexamined, as it were — reactions to each statement, both for my future reference, and perhaps to start being a bit more specific about what “theory”, as used all over the place in that other comment thread, means. (i.e. I’m also interested in other peoples’ reactions to these statements. Heck, turn it into a meme and post it on your blog, if you like.) These are slightly truncated versions of the statements, in most cases — Barry gives some elaboration — but I think they get the gist across.

Liberal humanism, then:

1. Good literature is of timeless significance; it somehow transcends the limitations and peculiarities of the age it was written in, and thereby speaks to what is constant in human nature.

Nah. I know from experience that the older the work I’m reading, the more work I have to do filling in historical context to get even a bare minimum of understanding of what’s going on, but more than that, there’s a part of me which believes that one of the most interesting things about literature is precisely the way in which it engages with the limitations and peculiarities of the age it is written in.

2. The literary text contains its own meaning within itself. It doesn’t require any elaborate process of placing it within a context, whether this be socio-political, literary-historical, or autobiographical.

See above; certainly some texts will resist the need for contextualisation more strongly than others, for a longer period of time than others, but ultimately I don’t think anything endures by itself forever; certain texts that appear to have endured have done so, in part, because the contextualisation they require has become part of the cultural air we breathe (i.e. Shakespeare), not because of anything inherent to the text itself.

3. To understand the text well it must be detached from these contexts and studied in isolation. What is needed is the close verbal analysis of the text without prior ideological assumptions, or political pre-conditions, or, indeed, specific expectations of any kind.

Mmf. Sort of. I do place close verbal analysis at the core of understanding a text, not least because it’s something I enjoy getting better at; and I do prefer to let a text suggest meaning to me than to go to a text looking for an answer to a question. But, of course, that is my prior ideological assumption. (I knew that much before I started reading the book.)

4. Human nature is essentially unchanging. The same passions, emotions, and even situations are seen again and again throughout human history. It follows that continuity in literature is more important and significant than innovation.

Nope. “Human nature”, to the extent that it can be defined at all, isn’t even the same from culture to culture in the present moment; I sincerely doubt it remains the same over centuries or longer. And, of course, as a science fiction reader one of the things I enjoy is imagination of the ways in which humanity can change in the future.

5. Individuality is something securely possessed within each of us as our unique “essence”. This transcends our environmental influences, and though individuality can change and develop (as do characters in novels) it can’t be transformed — hence our uneasiness with those scenes (quite common, for instance, in Dickens) which involve a “change of heart” in a character, so that the whole personality is shifted into a new dimension by force of circumstance.

This, on the other hand … “transcends our environmental influences” makes it sound like we’re born being who we are, which is clearly rubbish; but individuality as something that evolves but does not transform sounds right to me. I don’t think I’ve ever transformed in the way the process is described here; I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone to transform in that way, either. Life isn’t that easy.

6. The purpose of literature is essentially the enhancement of life and the propagation of humane values; but not in a programmatic way: if literature, and criticism, become overly and directly political they necessarily tend towards propaganda.

On the one hand, speaking again as a science fiction reader, I’m not supposed to mind a bit of didacticism in my fiction, and I’m sure I mind it less than most of the people Barry has in mind here. On the other hand, to the extent that literature can be said to have a purpose, “propagation of humane values”, in the sense of making, through literary creation, a sincere and compassionate attempt to understand people and the world, and to communicate that understanding to another, doesn’t seem so bad.

7. Form and content in literature must be fused in an organic way, so that the one grows inevitably from the other.

Must be? No. (Are there any “must” statements that could justly be applied to literature?) Can often very productively be? Yes.

8. This point about organic form applies above all to “sincerity”. Sincerity (comprising truth-to-experience, honesty towards the self, and the capacity for human empathy and compassion) is a quality which resides within the language of literature. It isn’t a fact or intention behind the work … sincerity is to be discovered within the text in such matters as the avoidance of cliche, or of over-inflated forms of expression; it shows in the use of first-hand, individualistic description … the truly sincere poet can transcend the sense of distance between language and material, and can make the language seem to “enact” what it depicts, thus apparently abolishing the necessary distance between words and things.

This seems more or less to be an expansion of point 6, which makes me wonder whether I’m misunderstanding one or both of them; but still, it seems largely sound to me.

9. What is valued in literature is the “silent” showing and demonstrating of something, rather than the explaining, or saying, of it. Hence, ideas as such are worthless in literature until given the concrete embodiment of “enactment”.

Sf-reader ping again: I suspect that what satisfies me as being an “enacted” idea wouldn’t necessarily satisfy the people Barry has in mind here; there’s that touch of didacticism to consider. But an idea that is worked through a text is a beautiful thing.

10. The job of criticism is to interpret the text, to mediate between it and the reader. A theoretical account of the nature of reading, or of literature in general, isn’t useful in criticism, and will simply, if attempted, encumber critics with “preconceived ideas” which will get between them and the text.

I have no problems with the first sentence. As to the second sentence … well, that’s why I’m reading the book, isn’t it?

All of this seems to suggest that I am not, actually, a full-on liberal humanist; but there are several points on that list that I wouldn’t want to let go of.

Now, on to Theory:

1. Many of the notions which we would usually regard as the basic “givens” of our existence (including our gender identity, our individual selfhood, and the notion of literature itself) are actually fluid and unstable things, rather than fixed and reliable essences.

Yes … to a point. Newtonian mechanics isn’t actually a wholly accurate description of how the universe works, but it’s a pretty good approximation for a lot of purposes. Cognitive neuroscience may reveal that my selfhood does not exist in the way that I perceive it to exist, but on a day to day basis my perceptions are what I have to work with. And to bring it back to literature, it is not possible to draw a sharp line between, say, science fiction and fantasy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful to talk about science fiction and fantasy as distinct types of literature.

2. All thinking and investigation is necessarily affected and largely determined by prior ideological commitment. The notion of disinterested enquiry is therefore untenable: none of us is capable of standing back from the scales and weighing things up dispassionately: rather, all investigators have a thumb on one side or other of the scales.

Yes, again to a point. Necessarily affected yes, largely determined, not necessarily. Acknowledging thumbs-on-scales is good; investigating the consequences of thumbs-on-scales is good; trying to construct systems of thought which compensate for thumbs-on-scales is also good. It may not be possible to carry out a purely disinterested enquiry, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to approximate it; it means we should be aware of the biases that factor into the attempt.

3. Language itself conditions, limits, and predetermines what we see. Thus, all reality is constructed through language, so that nothing is simply “there” in an unproblematical way — everything is a linguistic/textual construct. Language doesn’t record reality, it shapes and creates it, so that the whole of our universe is textual. Further, meaning is jointly constructed by reader and writer.

Define “reality”. Do I believe a physical universe could exist if no language existed to describe it? (Assuming here that the action of observation counts as a form of language.) Yes, I do. A rock doesn’t need to be called a rock to exist. Do I believe that our social reality, how we think and relate and describe, is constrained by the language we have to think in and relate through and describe with? Also yes. I don’t know what “the whole of our universe is textual” means. As for reader-writer interaction constructing meaning: yes, but with the caveat that this appears to be intended as at least a partial counter to “the job of criticism is to mediate between the reader and the text” above, and the two positions don’t seem exclusive to me. Reframe it as the job of criticism being to mediate the construction of a particular meaning, if you like.

4. Any claim to offer a definitive reading would be futile. The meanings within a literary work are never fixed and reliable but always shifting, multi-faceted and ambiguous.

Yes. I do not think, for instance, that Victoria Hoyle’s reading of Lucius Shepard is inferior to the author’s view of his own work. (But some meanings are more equal than others.)

5. “Totalising” notions are to be distrusted. For instance, the notion of “great” books as an absolute and self-sustaining category is to be distrusted, as books always arise out of a particular socio-political structure, and this situation should not be suppressed, as tends to happen when they are promoted to “greatness”. Likewise, the concept of a “human nature”, as a generalised norm which transcends the idea of a particular race, gender or class, is to be distrusted.

Yes — recognising the obvious paradox inherent in the statement — as long as “distrusted” means “recognise the limitations of” rather than “discard out of hand”.

And that’s the lot. Not quite a theorist yet, then. It occurs to me that the second list is somewhat less interesting to me, at first glance, simply because it says less about reading and interpreting; it talks in generalities, about principles that apply far beyond criticism, whereas what I’m interested in (what I’m reading the book for) is ways to talk about literature specifically. But I suppose that’s what the rest of the chapters will do.

Nebula Award Rules Revised

I had more or less given up on the Nebula Awards as a useful guide to, well, anything much, but it’s just been pointed out to me that they’ve quite dramatically revised their rules for 2009 and beyond. In particular:

  • No more rolling eligibility; the awards are now tied to the calendar year
  • No more preliminary ballot; there will be a nomination period between November and February, after which a final ballot will be created comprising the six works in each category with the most nominations
  • No more awards juries adding books to the ballot; “publishers are encouraged to make eligible works available to the membership”, and if there are fewer than six works nominated, then there will be fewer than six works on the ballot (Exception: The Andre Norton Award retains its jury)
  • No more “best script” category; instead the “Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation” (which is Not A Nebula) will be given to the writer and director of the winning work

I have to say, this all looks very positive, and I look forward to seeing the ballots that result.

Essential SF Criticism

Matt Cheney, in conversation with Eric Rosenfield, says:

Oh, SF criticism is a … minefield. There are a few problems with it, including that the sorts of people who will be attracted to it are generally not of the same sort of mind that is attracted to literary criticism, and there are only a handful of people who have a good grasp of real literary criticism who are also interested in practicing SF criticism. […] Much of what passes for SF “criticism” is actually just historiography. James Gunn is a good example of that. Useful and often interesting to read, but not what most people are talking about when they’re talking about “criticism”. Which many people would say is a good thing, since academic litcrit doesn’t exactly have the best rep outside the academy.

There are only a few writers of SF criticism worth paying much attention to in addition to Delany: Darko Suvin, Alexei Panshin, Damien Broderick, Frederick Jameson, and Adam Roberts (writers such as John Clute and Gary Wolfe are knowledgeable and thoughtful, but are primarily reviewers and taxonomists — Clute, in fact, has inspired an entire taxonomical industry amongst mostly British SF reviewers, who are bizarrely fixated on defining and categorizing things. Clute’s encyclopedias are invaluable and his reviews are often interesting, but the obsession with taxonomy [beyond its usefulness for creating an encyclopedia] is one I find mystifying). Certainly, there are articles here and there that are worth paying attention to, including some good recent work on SF and colonialism (an important topic, I think), but you’ll get pretty much the full breadth (such as it is) of the critical discussion of SF from reading those writers.

At the moment, I think I would find a discussion about whether or not literary taxonomy is a useful practice, never mind whether it is somehow a distinctively British practice, tedious in the extreme, so I’ll skate over that; and because it’s a posted email discussion, I’ll try not to be too judgmental about the “just” in front of “historiography”, though I am mildly offended on behalf of historiographers of my acquaintance. Later in the post there’s a deal of stuff about sf-the-publishing-category, too, which I’ll also avoid, except to say that I don’t think Nick Harkaway is wary of the sf label because he thinks the interesting things are happening outside sf, more that he’s concerned the label will stop people reading his book.

What I do want to talk about is a potential canon of sf criticism, because I’m pretty sure Matt’s list is not it. I’m not devaluing academic sf criticism, here, though I do feel a certain push-pull tension about it; on the one hand, it seems to me only sensible that dedicated training will improve someone’s ability to appreciate and explicate a work, which is one reason I went to the SF Foundation Masterclass last summer [1], and is why I’m currently reading this book [2] . On the other hand, though I don’t consider it a badge of pride to be “outside the academy”, I do somewhat resent the implication that those not trained in the ways of criticism have no useful contributions to make to critical debate, and I would have thought that attracting people with different sorts of mind to literary studies would be all to the good. The SF Masterclass’s principle of drawing its teachers from the ranks of academics, authors and independent critics seems to me a sound one; I have gained useful insights about sf from people in all three groups.

However: the bibliography of sf criticism on the SF Studies website is dauntingly large. For a slightly more focused list, the articles from their history of science fiction criticism issue are all very useful (hey, now Gary Westfahl’s article is online as well! That would have been useful eight months ago), and I know some of the names I’d want to add to Matt’s list — Atheling, Aldiss, Russ, Freedman, Jones, for starters, and something like The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, at least. But I also know there are a number of people reading this better-read than I in sf criticism: what would you put on an essential reading list? (And, perhaps, what non-sf critics would you put on an essential reading list for would-be critics?)

[1] As Liz says, do consider applying for this year’s class; I won’t be there, sadly, because my car’s just had an unexpectedly expensive service and I’m battening down the financial hatches, but I wish I could be.

[2] And I’m sure that once I’ve got past finding the fact that apparently, in English departments, calling someone a “liberal humanist” is an insult, alternately hilarious and really stupid, it will provide me with many useful insights, and possibly even a blog post or two.

Machine

Machine coverA curious little book, this, ostensibly the story of a speck of matter from its “highest degree of concentration” to its “most unstructured state”. The former is in the heart of a dawn horse, Eohippus, fifty-five million years before the present; the latter is as the products of the combustion of a drop of petrol in a Ford Pinto, produced at 7.59pm on the 23rd of June 1975 on 1st South Street in Austin, Texas. The moments of overspecification of place and time are not intended (as they are in, say, the narratorial voice-overs in Pushing Daisies) to indicate the comforting embrace of Story; rather they are intended to emphasize the chill inhumanity of the shaping of the world by cause and effect and time. Although there is a human tale within Machine, it is usually crufted with technical, scientific and historical detail, in passages such as this:

It happened as they turned right into the car park at Timber Creek Apartments: the fibres in the calf muscle of Jimmy’s right leg had reacted to the electrochemical signals from his nervous system with a contraction that rearranged the internal positioning of the ankle bones, thus creating a downward pressure which transmitted through his sock and shoe to the rubber-covered surface of the accelerator pedal. From the pedal the command was transmitted to the throttle valve, which opened up and activated the fuel injections system, thus sucking the drop from the tank and transporting it via the pump to the filter and from there into the carburettor that mixed the fuel with air from the open throttle valve. The mixture was carried through the suction manifold to the injection nozzle of the third cylinder, where the suction valve opened as the piston moved downwards from its uppermost dead centre and created a subpressure which sucked the aerated petrol into the cylinder. At the lowest dead centre of the piston, the valve closed so the piston, returning to the upper dead centre, compressed the gas mixture, and just before its arrival the spark plug gave off a tiny spark and ignited the petrol whose combustion occurred at a temperature of just below 2000o Celcius and a pressure of 40 bar.

‘BANG!’ it went. (75-76)

It’s not all like this, of course — some of it is perfectly traditional narrative, with dialogue and everything — and it’s not done without a sense of humour, from the central “horse power” pun to that BANG! But there is quite a lot of what is essentially non-fiction writing about everything from engineering to chemistry to geology to philosophy. Perhaps the story it reminded me of most strongly is Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), in its counterpointing of the mundane (a meeting between two young people) and the vastness of existence, although Peter Adolphsen’s tale doesn’t seek the emotional intensity of Zoline’s: rather, as I said, it is chill, interested in life precisely as a remorseless, endless mechanism. There is little room for desire, of any kind — even that Eohippus is not killed by a hungry predator, but drowns after being startled by a flash of lightning.

Similarly, the encounter between Machine‘s two principle human characters would in another work probably be the start of a love story, but here is purely a mechanism of plot, which is not even consumated, let alone fully resolved. Its significance lies in the parallels it allows to be drawn between various kinds and levels of order, human systems related to broader scientific ones rather than contrasted. Jimmy Nash is Djamolidine Hasanov, an immigrant who escaped from the former USSR in 1970, who found work on an oil pipeline in Utah, but who lost an arm in an accident. His story is the negotiation of organization in the form of power structures, with the formal hierarchy of the USSR (which of course is on an anti-entropic historical trajectory towards perfection) contrasted with the informal conformity of the USA. There is a tension between who he is in each country — he trains a a cyclist, and we are told he is a perfect cycling machine; but like the speck of matter, he must change from one form to another when he leaves, metamorphose from a Soviet to an American. As a hitch-hiker, he’s picked up by Clarissa Sanders, who we are told is average in all ways except her fascination with biology (at one point we are told that she distrusts the hippy vision of humanity at one with nature, and believes that human behaviour could only be fully understood through controlled experiments). When she imagines a future in which molecular genetics is becoming the most important system affecting individuals’ daily lives, we know she is right; but she sees only the potential benefits. When she tries to explain her vision to Jimmy, he sees Gattaca. He gives her some LSD (the discovery and pharmacology of which is of course described by Adolphsen’s narrator), and during the trip that follows rather than perceiving the one-ness of everything she perceives that everything is “too complicated” (70), which feels like a kind of truth.

Of course, it’s a fiction, and there’s a constant awareness in Machine of the tension that telling this story creates between fiction and fact – between the notion that these events are made up, yet something like them has almost certainly happened. Early in the story, a census official, waxing philosophical about the problems with censuses to Djamolidine and his family, notes that “selection and interpretation are activities which presume an acting subject” (19), i.e. that even the census, which involves selection and interpretation, is not pure fact; and by extension, no such narrative of pure fact is possible, no matter how likely it may be. Djamolidine subsequently attempts to improve on the census company’s survey design, but is thwarted by, e.g. intermarriage and other such unavoidable hybridisation problems, reinforcing the point.

The end of Machine takes this concern to a logical conclusion: the narration resolves into the first person, with the narrator revealing themselves to be the neighbour of one of the other characters, and explaining that they’ve been writing the preceding story (1) as a result of a spiritual vision and (2) as a means of escaping from depression. More, the narrator explicitly refuses the idea that they have the omniscience required to know the story they’ve just told, undermining the sense of certainty that Machine has spent the rest of its length establishing, and restoring a view of the universe in which human imagination is central. Clearly Adolphsen felt it would be something like dishonest to pretend to any other view, but on first reading, I found the shift unwelcome – the last twenty pages or so, which have the feel of a reassurance that endings are real and meaningful, and even imbue the speck with something like a sense of destiny, seemed to sit uneasily with earlier insistences that “Death exists, but only in a practical, macroscopic sense” (10), and that stuff is never created or destroyed, merely transformed from one state to another. On reflection, I think if anything it reinforces the distance between the human scale and the broader story the book tells: because for humans, of course, endings are not just real and meaningful, but inevitable.

Further Adventures in Reading Lists

Previously:

And now, Gardner Dozois:

The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection

“Turing’s Apples” by Stephen Baxter (Eclipse 2)
“From Babel’s Fall ‘N Glory We Fled” by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s)
“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
“Boojum” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette (Fast Ships, Black Sails)
“The Six Directions of Space” by Alastair Reynolds (Galactic Empires)
“N-Words” by Ted Kosmatka (Seeds of Change)
“An Eligible Boy” by Ian McDonald (Fast Forward 2)
“Shining Armour” by Dominic Green (Solaris Book of SF 2)
“The Hero” by Karl Schroeder (Eclipse 2)
“Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Solaris Book of SF 2)
“Five Thrillers” by Robert Reed (F&SF)
“The Sky That Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and into the Black” by Jay Lake (Clarkesworld)
“Incomers” by Paul McAuley (The Starry Rift)
“Crystal Nights” by Greg Egan (Interzone)
“The Egg Man” by Mary Rosenblum (Asimov’s)
“His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi (Interzone)
“The Political Prisoner” by Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF)
“Balancing Accounts” by James L. Cambias (F&SF)
“Special Economics” by Maureen F McHugh (Del Rey Book of SFF)
“Days of Wonder” by Geoff Ryman (F&SF)
“City of the Dead” by Paul McAuley (PostScripts)
“The Voyage Out” by Gwyneth Jones (Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures)
“The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm” by Daryl Gregory (Eclipse 2)
“G-Men” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Sideways in Crime)
“The Erdmann Nexus” by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s)
“Old Friends” by Garth Nix (Dreaming Again)
“The Ray Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s)
“Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” by Gord Sellar (Asimov’s)
“Butterfly, Falling at Dawn” by Aliette de Bodard (Interzone)
“The Tear” by Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)

Not much that can be picked up online here. Thirty stories, eight by women (or nine female authors); fourteen stories from magazines, with Asimov’s for once getting the best of F&SF, 5-4. Seven stories overlap with Strahan, five with Horton, none in all three books.

The Best of 2008, Redux

Following on from Liz’s two lists of her best 2008 reads, here are some more for you to peruse.

And on related notes:

(Of course, you may be wondering what my books of the year are. Unfortunately, I acquired Final Fantasy XII over Christmas, and have now been well and truly sucked in, which means that blogging is falling by the wayside a little. Plus, there’s a whole bunch of 2008 titles I haven’t read yet, and want to get to before the Hugo nomination deadline at the end of February. So, no lists from me at the moment, I’m afraid.)

Going Linker

I’ve been quiet over the holiday period (hope everyone had a good one), but there’s been plenty to read elsewhere:

Miscellany

I’ve posted my additional thoughts about “Divining Light“; thanks to everyone else who read the story and commented. Hopefully discussion will continue …

What’s interesting to me about Clute’s review of Half a Crown, and the reason it has made sure what was already pretty likely beforehand, that I will read the Small Change trilogy, is that it seems to me to contain or imply an interesting set of ideas about what dystopian fiction is and does, and how it works. For starters, there’s the implied question of whether you can write a dystopia with a happy, or even relatively happy, ending. A friend of mine observed recently (in a separate discussion) that there’s a reason most dystopias end with a boot stamping on the face of humanity, forever; it’s because dystopias are almost always intended to warn in some way, and if they end with a boot stamping on the face of humanity, for a while, the force of that warning inevitably gets dissipated in some way. Is that the case? How might a story get around it? What might be gained that might compensate for that lack of force, if it does occur? There are also the arguments Clute advances about formula and technique. It’s Clute’s argument (as I read it) that, however effective the narrow perspective is in the first two books, by the time you get to the third book it starts to look like avoidance. This seems plausible; it also seems like something that might vary from reader to reader. (Indeed, based on the fact that Clute’s is the only reaction to Small Change even remotely this negative, it seems that it certainly dose vary from reader to reader.) Why? Similarly, Clute argues that Small Change’s adherence to a formal structure makes its ending — however historically grounded it may be — unconvincing as fiction because it makes the fall of a fascist government look like “a plot twist”; in other words, makes it look in some sense unearned, or trivial, which retroactively diminishes the achievement of the trilogy. This may just be a potential pitfall of fiction that wishes to adhere to a formula, even in homage; or it may be something that particularly afflicts dystopian fiction. I find it more interesting to think about, at any rate, than Benjamin Kunkel’s article about dystopianism. (See also.)

I’m still rather enjoying Isvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. I mentioned the “novum” chapter in this post; the book as a whole is built around discussion of a number of “attractors” that Csicsery-Ronay Jr has identified as characteristic elements of sf, and contains a version of the argument that we are living in inherently science-fictional times that’s a bit more grounded than most I’ve read. Had I been a bit more patient, however, I could have used more of the book with reference to my discussion of Bernadine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots, namely some of the comments made in the discussion on “Future History”. Csicsery-Ronay Jr (yes, I have to check myself every single time I write that name, why do you ask?) is particularly attached to sf as a venue for various kinds of play; so although he identifies several kinds of future history common to sf, including utopian/revolutionary (change brought about by conscious action on the part of humanity) and evolutionary (change brought about as a result of unconscious, adaptive forces), his clear favourite is what he terms “dispersive” histories, in which change is essentially random, or (and this is what made it seem relevant to Blonde Roots) somehow walled off from the real we know.

It is sometimes said that any prophesied future that does not come to pass becomes a divergent reality. […] The more of these a public is exposed to, the less naive they become about projections, and the more comfortable with alternate histories that lack causal connections with the familiar present. Quantity turns to quality: so many predictions have been made, so many fictive prophecies have become uchronias and “fantastic philosophy”, that they rival the number of sincere predictions. Reading sf now incorporates the discounting process of already viewing it as an alternative timeline or retrofuture.
[…]
By disrupting the temporal logic of continuity with the present, alternative histories appear to renounce the ethical seriousness of the revolutionary and evolutionary paradigms. If there is no connection, how can there be responsibility? On the surface, such dispersed worlds lack even the minimal gravity of other kinds of uture history. It makes sense to view this scattering as an example of the flattening of historical consciousness that Jameson considers a defining quality of postmodernism. The sense of the continuity of unidirectional time lived toward death and succeeding generations, which links the experience of individual life with collective history, is replaced by an infinite array. […] The abstract dispersal of realities frees them not only from the burden of an inexorable past, but from the resistance of nature and embodiment altogether. (97-8)

That last sentence, in particular, seems a good way of summing up what I think Evaristo was aiming for — freedom from the burden of an inexorable past — without losing the ability to comment on that past, and on our present.

I’m not happy about this change to the David Gemmell Legend Award rules [pdf]:

After receiving lots of feedback from fans, readers and industry alike, we at the
DGLA have – after much deliberation – come to the decision to make the David
Gemmell Legend Award completely publicly voted.

This means that once the Longlist closes, the top 5 novels will be put forward to the
Shortlist Poll and YOU will be able to have the final say about who should win, by
voting once more on the shortlist! Readers and fans will be involved at every step to
produce our winner.

What was interesting about the Award, to me, was precisely that the final stage was juried; I was looking forward to seeing how the judges evaluated the award’s criteria. While popular vote awards certainly have their place, I can’t muster the enthusiasm for another one right now.

An Experiment in Comparative Interpretation

Earlier this week, I said positive things about Ted Kosmatka’s story “Divining Light“, in particular praising the ending. However, in the wake of that post I’ve been exchanging emails with a couple of other people, and it turns out we all have a different interpretation of the ending; in particular, what the ending means for the narrator of the story, and for his co-worker.

I’m going away for a couple of days, and won’t be back online until Sunday evening, so I thought I might invite you all to do some homework: go and read the story, and then post a comment here about what you think happens at the end. (And about any other aspects of the story that grab your interest.) When I get back, I’ll post what I think it means, and why (even if nobody else has done so).