Author: Niall

As Others See JG Ballard

For many readers, Ballard is the author of the controversial novel Crash (1973), a surreal exploration of sexuality and the motor car. But before Crash, and before his wife’s death, Ballard’s novels had begun to shape a unique suburban dystopia. In its time, this vision was categorised as science fiction. Now we can see it more clearly as deeper, darker and more prophetic.

Riiight.

Cloverfield

I didn’t enjoy Cloverfield in most of the ways I think the writer and director expected me to enjoy it. The characters, though not quite as two-dimensional as advertised, were bland enough that their deaths didn’t mean a whole lot — although that said, I didn’t find myself as irritated as Roz Kaveney, since yes, the characters are mostly dumb, but (a) they’re disaster-movie dumb, (b) they’re clearly meant to be completely unprepared, practically and emotionally, for what’s happening to them, and (c) the whole film moves along at such a clip that you don’t notice most of the dumbness while it’s happening.

I wasn’t particularly gripped by the story per se, and I especially wasn’t gripped when it was being a New York Story. Although it’s impossible to watch Cloverfield without thinking of 9/11, as Richard Larson points out it’s actually handled with a remarkably light touch; where I disagree with Richard, probably because I don’t live in New York (but bear in mind that’s going to be true for the majority of the film’s audience) is that I think the most effective sequences in the film are those that don’t use the New York setting in any way. I’m thinking of the generic horror/disaster-movie sequences, like the journey through the subway tunnels or the rescue from the collapsing skyscraper, that could be happening in any modern metropolis. Aside from that shot of the Statue of Liberty’s head, I don’t think any of the glimpses that Cloverfield offers will stay with me as New York Images — for comparison, I found the empty vistas of I Am Legend rather more powerful.

I didn’t even get the “hey, that was awesome” buzz that I expected to get from watching a rampaging monster. At least not much. It turns out that not-quite seeing a monster stomping buildings and military vehicles to junk is, for me, much less viscerally satisfying than seeing the carnage full-on. I think Howard Waldrop alludes to the reason in his comments for Locus Online: for a dumb movie, Cloverfield makes you use your brain too much. It’s a bit too artfully casual, for instance; I never really believed that this was found footage, as opposed to a director trying to imitate found footage. All the odd angles and fleeting shots of shoes and legs in the world couldn’t save it from seeming staged.

Which, you would think, doesn’t leave much for me to like, yet I do find myself turning the film over in my mind. I think what interests me is not so much the effect of it being presented as found footage as the logic behind Matt Reeves and Drew Goddard’s choice to do so. As Mark Kermode quite reasonably pointed out in his review on Radio Five, this is hardly a new technique, but the combination of subject matter (by which I mean “New York disaster”, not “monster movie”) and style and timing amount to an argument that more than ever, this is how the world is reported to us. One of the things I liked about the pilot of The Sarah Connor Chronicles was that the first way it signalled its protagonists had time-travelled ten years into their future, to our present — not a huge distance, on the face of it — was to have someone immediately start filming them with a cameraphone. Cloverfield takes this to the nth degree — it’s not just the protagonists who are running around with a camera, seemingly half the people caught up in the attack are using their phone or their camera to capture the event as it happens, giving us not so much user-generated content as victim-generated content. And the film never breaks this reality. Nobody ever explains what really happened, or indeed what happened next, and though there are some obvious concessions to disaster-movie plotting, there’s also a satisfying sense of arbitrariness to some of the deaths. Once again, there’s nothing about this that succeeds in drawing me in and making me feel; but it tickles my brain. So despite the fact that Cloverfield largely fails as a film, I think it succeeds as an artifact.

Celebration

celebrationwraparound

This rather handsome picture is a piece of original artwork by Vincent Chong. It’s going to be the cover of an 80,000-word anthology of original fiction, edited by Ian Whates, that the BSFA is publishing to mark its 50th anniversary. And here’s the table of contents:

Celebration, ed. Ian Whates

The BSFA – An Appreciation – Pat Cadigan
“The Jubilee Plot” – Stephen Baxter
“Wilson at Woking” – Ken MacLeod
“The Killing Fields” – Kim Lakin-Smith
“Having the Time of His Life” – Ian Watson
“The Dog Hypnotist” – Tricia Sullivan
“The Crack Angel” – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
“Keep Smiling with Great Minutes” – M. John Harrison
“Living with the Dead” – Molly Brown
“Next to Godliness” – Brian Stableford
“Mellowing Grey” – Dave Hutchinson
“At Shadow Cope” – Liz Williams
“Peculiar Bone, Unimaginable Key” – Brian Aldiss
“Deciduous Trees” – Martin Sketchley
“Soirée” – Alastair Reynolds
“On the Sighting of Other Islands” – Ian R. MacLeod
“Fireflies” – Christopher Priest
“The Man of the Strong Arm” – Adam Roberts
An Afterword – Ian Whates

So, see you at the launch event at Orbital?

Ooh

Guillermo del Toro will be directing The Hobbit.

Guillermo del Toro has officially signed up to direct The Hobbit, according to reports leaking out from a film premiere in France. The Pan’s Labyrinth creator will oversee a double-bill of films based on JRR Tolkien’s fantasy adventure, which paved the way for The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson, director of the Oscar-winning Rings trilogy, will serve as executive producer.

Interesting choice. I can actually see this being better than if Jackson was directing, in some ways.

P.S. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles — best new show of the 07/08 tv season? I love me some Pushing Daisies, but Sarah Connor is actual science fiction, so I am biased towards it. Particularly when they have John Connor mention the singularity.

LinkCo

Out Now or Coming Soon

Per my reading resolutions, I was hoping that quite a bit of my reading in 2008 will have some other date on the copyright page. Then I sat down and started making notes for this post. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, it seems.

January: Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo

ravenous_youth

Long-time readers will remember that I rather liked Guo’s previous, Orange-shortlisted novel, so this, when I saw it on the shelves in Borders, was an automatic purchase. Unlike A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Twenty Fragments is set entirely in China, being the story of a girl who moves from the country to Beijing to find a job in the film industry. It looks like Guo’s semi-autobiographical tendencies are still in force, then, but if Fenfang is anything like as engaging as Z, this should be a winner. (In other news, according to this profile, “her next book and film […] are about UFOs and aliens, loosely inspired by China’s place in the world.”)

February: Mushishi, volume 3, by Yui Urushibara

mu_shi_shi_3

Or, at any rate, so claim Amazon. I hope they’re right, because Urushibara’s series is one of the two best comics I discovered last year (or more accurately, was introduced to by Micole, the other being Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim, which is its opposite in many ways). I keep trying to write something about the first two volumes and failing. I get as far as explaining that mushi are an entire kingdom of living beings half way between a sort of microorganism and a sort of spirit, that each volume collects five or six short stories about the travels of a mushi master (mushishi), that the setting is rural Japan, and that the artwork is beautifully textured — but then I don’t know how to capture the tone of the stories, the poignancy of them. Maybe I’ll have another go when I get my hands on volume three.

Also out in February: Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut collection, Pump Six and Other Stories (having read very nearly all of the intense science fiction stories that make up this book already, it seems likely that it’s going to be one of the best collections of the year; maybe reading them all together will reveal weaknesses not previously obvious, but I doubt it); Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago; a new Victor Pelevin novel, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf; Paul Melko’s interesting-looking debut, Singularity’s Ring; and Weaver, the conclusion of Stephen Baxter’s Time’s Tapestry sequence, which looks like it will actually tip over into full alternate history.

March: Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell

dreamers_of_the_day

Godawful cover, but it’s a new novel by Mary Doria Russell! This one looks to be a posthumous fantasy set behind the scenes at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, but really that’s irrelevant, because it’s a new novel by Mary Doria Russell; it gets bought. Also in March, Swiftly by Adam Roberts (set in a world in which, after Gulliver returned from his travels, others went after him and enslaved the various races he found; the short story that makes up the first chapter of this novel is possibly my favourite of Roberts’ short fiction, so I have high hopes for the rest of the book) and, according to Locus at least, Ian R Macleod’s Song of Time, which “tells the story of this century through the eyes of a great musician as she unravels the mysteries of her past, and contemplates making the ultimate leap into life beyond the body.” I have my doubts as to whether it will actually show up in March, since PS novels have a habit of appearing a bit later than advertised, but I have my fingers crossed.

April: Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn

rhetorics

This is the book which elaborates on the taxonomy of fantasy that Farah Mendlesohn started using a few years ago (portal fantasy/immersive fantasy/intrusive fantasy/liminal fantasy); it should be a book to get one’s teeth into. I’m looking forward to it not least because I understand it actually engages with examples from contemporary fantasy, in all its diversity. Also this month: Jonathan Strahan’s YA anthology The Starry Rift (complete with gorgeous cover, and Kelly Link sf story); a UK edition of a new Michael Marshall Smith novel, The Servants (I read a couple of the Michael Marshall thrillers, but never found them as satisfying as the MMS books); House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, which sounds as though it will be epic in scope even by Reynolds’ standards; and a new Philip Pullman novella set in the world of His Dark Materials, Once Upon a Time in the North.

May: Incandescence by Greg Egan

incandescence

’nuff said.

June: Flood by Stephen Baxter

flood

Isn’t that a good cover? This looks, on the face of it, like Baxter does global warming, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be an update of The Kraken Wakes (given that the Amazon description begins “Next year. Sea levels begin to rise. The change is far more rapid than any climate change predictions; metres a year”, which sounds like external intervention to me). Either way, I’m ready for another hefty Baxter science fiction tome, now that he’s done with the historicals. Also this month a brace of notable debuts (Superpowers by David J Schwartz, Principle of Angels by Jaine Fenn, and The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway — the last of which really sounds like it’s got a bit of everything, although the comparisons to Douglas Adams that have cropped up in a couple of places make me nervous) and Ellen Datlow’s Del Rey Book of SF & Fantasy.

July and beyond

The Locus forthcoming books issues and Amazon’s advance listings will only take you so far, and this is the point at which the future becomes misty. I’m sure there are many books scheduled for the second half of the year that I’ll want to read just as badly as the ones mentioned above. In August, the ones I know about and know something about are Ken MacLeod’s The Night Sessions (which, set “after the Middle East wars” in a time when “terrorism is history”, looks like a complement to The Execution Channel in a number of ways), Jo Walton’s Half a Crown (although I have some catch-up reading to do before I can read it), and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s collection The Ant King and Other Stories (which may give Bacigalupi’s book a run for its money); there’s also Sarah Hall’s next book, The Bottles, about which I only know the title. After that, there’s a new Kelly Link collection, The Wrong Grave and Other Stories; Lydia Millet’s new book How the Dead Dream (yes, I know it’s out in the US already — don’t tempt me); and, dare I hope, the fifth volume of Scott Pilgrim?

In short, it seems there’ll be enough to keep me out of trouble. What’s everyone else looking forward to?

No Sneer Here

Andrew Wheeler said:

SF Awards Watch has the full list of [BSFA Awards] nominees; all we need now is the American version of Niall Harrison to come into the comment thread and sneer at it.

For the record, my reaction to the Nebula preliminary ballot wasn’t intended to be a sneer, though I suppose I can’t really fault Andrew for getting that impression. It was, rather, a scream of frustration and disappointment.

I realise that I care more about literary awards than the average sf reader, never mind the average person on the street, but I do care. There are two general categories of awards I find useful: those awards that identify books I’m likely to be interested in (or am interested in an am pleased to see recognised), and those awards that represent the tastes of groups of readers I’m interested in. Awards in the first group tend to be juried — the Clarke, the Tiptree, the World Fantasy Awards. Awards in the second group tend (not entirely by definition) to be popular vote awards — the Hugo, the BSFA Awards.

The Nebula Awards, by all rights, should be in both groups. I’m an avid reader of sf, so I respect sf writers and am interested in what they, as practitioners, consider to be good sf; and the early Nebula winners are a pretty good list of essential science fiction. And yet, increasingly, they’re not in either group, to the point where my only response is bafflement. Readers who prefer Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage to Geoff Ryman’s Air and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — readers who prefer Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas — are not readers I have much in common with. It’s not even that the shortlists are horrible; it’s just that the winners seem to be the mediocre (yes, in my opinion) choices. Hence, frustration.

But enough of this looking back! Tomorrow, the books I’m looking forward to reading in 2008.

P.S. In the same post, Andrew comments on the nomination of Alice in Sunderland, and Saxon commented here. I haven’t read it yet, but I’d be interested in other thoughts.

P.P.S. Following my thoughts on cover art, a couple of interesting comments from Tom Abba:

. If the likes of Atwood, Palahniuk, McCarthy and Winterston do any long term good, it might be to persuade publishers to revisit what counts as ‘SF artwork’. Fantasy publishers, for example, could do a lot worse than commission Sam Taylor-Wood, Matthew Barney, Chris Anthony or even Stefan Sagmeister rather than relying on the ‘richly painted dragon’ motif that’s been done to death.

P.P.P.S. For those who didn’t see the comment on the main shortlist announcement post, there’s now a livejournal community for the discussion of nonfiction about sf and fantasy (which is of relevance to the Hugo Best Related Book category as well as the BSFA Awards).

London Meeting: Robert Holdstock

At the request of a certain Vector editor, who forgot to post this before going to work, I’m here to take over Torque Control make the following announcement:

The guest for tonight’s BSFA meeting will be Robert Holdstock, interviewed by Paul Kincaid.

Venue (for the last time):
Upstairs room, The Star Tavern
6 Belgrave Mews West

As usual, the interview is due to start at 7pm, but the room is open from 6, and fans will be in the downstairs bar from 5.

There’s a map here.

Hope to see you all there,

Mystery Guest Poster x