Author: Niall

BSFA Awards: Non-Fiction

Nominations for the BSFA Awards need to be received by midnight on Saturday 19th January. That’s a week on Saturday, so for those of you who haven’t made your nominations yet, I thought I’d put up some posts to jog your memories, and encourage you to do so.

First up is the non-fiction award, which after all the debate has reverted to a purer, simpler form:

The Best Non-Fiction award is open to any written work about science fiction and/or fantasy which appeared in its current form in 2007, in print or online.

There are two books that I’m pretty sure I’m going to nominate; I’m still deliberating about shorter works.

The first book is Jeff Prucher’s Brave New Words. This has received, to be kind, mixed reviews, but I am impressed enough to think it deserves a nomination, though I probably wouldn’t vote for it as a winner. The two main criticisms of it, that I’ve seen, have to do with the selection criteria and with the accuracy. On the latter point, it seems to me you have to take any dictionary of citations as a work in progress, and any errors you find as an invitation to contribute a correction; and I didn’t find that many errors, though I’m not convinced that “infodump” was first used by Howard Waldrop as late as 1990. The earliest citation for “science fiction”, by the way, is from W. Wilson’s 1851 Little Earnest Book upon Great Old Subject [sic], which describes “Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true — thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life.” That is, if you ask me, a rather fine way of putting it, and I would be surprised if there were citations from much earlier.

As to the selection criteria: Prucher includes five major categories of words: fanspeak, critical terms, sf terms used in a non sf sense (“space cadet”), words that were not coined in sf but are closely associated with it (“cyborg”), and — this may be the controversial one — words coined in sf if they are used either in multiple fictional universes, or in mainstream conversation. Which means “newspeak” (and, entertainingly, “frell”, although not “dren” or — my personal favourite Farscape-ism — “mivonks”), but no “dilithium”. Moreover, there’s nothing since 1999 — an arbitrary line had to be drawn somewhere, and the end of the 20th century is as good a place to draw one as any, but it does mean there’s no entry for “new weird” (or “mundane sf”, or “interstitial”; “slipstream”, being older, does get an entry). Within these parameters, so far as I can tell from a random sampling, the book does its job: I haven’t yet gone looking for something that falls within Prucher’s criteria but isn’t there. So the question is whether you think one or more categories should have been left out, or another category should have been added. I think having all the categories in one book adds richness, and makes simply browsing the thing more enjoyable than browsing a dictionary really should be. And when it comes down to it, this is a dictionary which, with a straight face, having explained in the “note on definitions” that for obvious reasons “they” and “their” are used as singular and plural third-person pronouns, avers that “Definitions of words relating to science fiction fans and writers, however, can be assumed to have human referents” (xxiv).

The second book is The Country You Have Never Seen, by Joanna Russ. Billed as a collection of essays, letters and reviews, it’s really the latter that are the main attraction. The earliest review, from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, is dated December 1966; the latest, from The Washington Post “Book World”, is dated May 10, 1981. They are by no means all reviews of science fiction books — there’s a healthy smattering of more academic reviews, mostly of (as you would expect) more academic feminist texts — and even more than most collections of reviews, it’s a very partial sampling of the field of the time. But they are spectacular. Until now, everything I’ve read by Russ has invoked admiration without enthralling me; it’s probably just down to the fact that here she’s closer to my core interests, but I flat-out enjoyed this book more than any other of Russ’s that I’ve read.

As a critic, Russ is merciless, impressively concise (anyone who wants to know why and how reviewers should quote from the books they read can learn a lot here), and unapologetically funny. Of a particularly poor first novel (Retreat as it Was! by Donna J. Young) she says she wants “to convey as forcefully as possible the absolute, limp, thinness of the book”; then, ‘What is the book about? Hugging, I think. Thirty-nine (non-erotic) hugs and seventeen incidents of weeping occur in one hundred and six pages, which averages out to one hug per 2.7 pages, one weep every 9.4 pages, and one of either (if you’re not picky) every 1.9 pages”(183). Riffing on George Bernard Shaw’s description of plays as either artificial or real rabbits (commercial work is the artificial rabbit, true works of art the real deal), Russ says that “Ben Bova’s Millennium is an artificial rabbit. My copy tried to eat real grass in the back yard and died” (125). She seems to have a particular fondness for James Blish (she reviews more books by him than by any other writer, and cites his criticism more frequently than she cites any other critic, too) and Kate Wilhelm (I am left with a strong desire to seek out and read more Kate Wilhelm), but in general roams pretty widely, even if the unhelpfully sparse table of contents makes it hard to hold a picture of her range in your head.

Perhaps the most striking — and, I have to say, refreshing — aspect of the reviews is that, more than any critic working today, Russ is first, foremost and proudly a science fiction critic. Not for her the present received wisdom that science fiction and fantasy are really, when you get down to it, the same thing; if the Joanna Russ who wrote these reviews still exists, I imagine she would not be terribly impressed with Interfictions or Feeling Very Strange. (But how I would like to know for sure!) It’s not that she necessarily doesn’t like fantasy, but she is more prone to be impatient with it. In one of her columns for F&SF, for instance, she strongly criticises a slate of fantasy novels, drawing a storm of protest letters. Her response?

I know it’s painful to be told that something in which one has invested intense emotion is not only bad art but bad for you, not only bad for you but ridiculous. I didn’t do it to be mean, honest. Nor did I do it because the promise held out by heroic fantasy, the promise of escape into a wonderful Other world, is one I find temperamentally unappealing. On the contrary, it’s because I understand the intensity of the demand so well (having spent my twenties reading Eddison and Tolkien; I even adapted The Hobbit for the stage) that I also understand the absolute impossibility of ever fulfilling that demand. The current popularity of heroic fantasy scares me; I believe it to be a symptom of political and cultural reaction due to economic depression. […] That our literary heritage began with feudal epics and marchen is no reason to keep on writing them forever. […] Reality is everything. Reality is what there is. Only the hopelessly insensitive find reality so pleasant as to never want to get away from it, but painkillers can be bad for the health, and even if they were not, I am damned if anyone will make me say that the newest fad in analgesics is equivalent to the illumination which is the other thing (besides pleasure) art ought to provide. (169-70)

Other contenders? I haven’t read it yet, but if Mike Ashley’s Gateways to Forever is as the other volumes in his history of magazines, and reports seem to suggest that it is, then it would be a worthy nominee. And the SF Studies issue devoted to Afrofuturism that Adam Roberts mentions in his contribution to the Strange Horizons year-in-review sounds interesting. But I must have missed things. What else was out there?

Reading Resolutions

I wasn’t going to make any reading resolutions for 2008, or at least not any major ones — what’s the point of being free from award-submission reading if I can’t go where my whims take me for a while, after all? But then I came across Larry’s post, and while not everything he says goes for me (I definitely don’t want to review at least 50 books in 2008; maybe more like 30), most of it does. Additional to those, then, I’ll add:

1. Read The Baroque Cycle. This is the sort of thing I’ll never get around to reading unless I make a project of it, not because I don’t want to read it — I badly do — but because it’s so big that I’ll want to wander off and read something shorter half-way through. But if I say, up front, that I’m going to read The Baroque Cycle this year, I might actually manage it.

2. Read A Suitable Boy. Back when I started seeing the ever-radiant Nic (yes, of Eve’s Alexandra fame), we agreed that we would each read five books that the other recommended. She’s read most of mine; I’m way behind. In my defense, this is because one of her picks is this, Vikram Seth’s 1500-page opus, forced on me in a second-hand bookshop when I dared express a preference for short books. As of May, my excuse for not reading it will expire, so if I suddenly fall silent sometime that month, you’ll know why.

3. Catch up on my YA reading. I’ve accumulated quite a little pile of YA titles over the past eighteen months or so — Octavian Nothing, The Green Glass Sea, Flora Segunda, Life As We Knew It, How I Live Now — and this seems like a good time to finally get around to reading them. Plus, they should be nice an d quick, which will balance out the Seth/Stephenson effect.

4. Read for parallax. I’ve been playing around with ideas of what books I want to write about here. I suspect most of my reviews of new sf titles will go to other places — Vector, Strange Horizons, NYRSF and Foundation. What I think I want to do here is, on the one hand, short fiction, and on the other, clusters of books that I haven’t read before but that (in theory) resonate in some way. So, for example, I might do a climate change binge including some or all of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, Mary Rosenblum’s Water Rites, Maggie Gee’s The Flood, TC Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, and Stephen Baxter’s (forthcoming) Flood. (What’s the first climate change novel? Do we count The Kraken Wakes?)

All-in, I think I’m going to aim for about 60 books in 2008; I find that reading at the rate I’ve been doing for the past couple of years doesn’t leave enough time for thinking, let alone writing. But we’ll see how it goes.

Change of Address

A slightly belated announcement, on account of only just having returned to the Land of Internet after moving house. (Did you all have a good Christmas?) The editorial address for Vector is now:

73 Sunderland Avenue
Oxford
OX2 8DT

I’m not sure if I’m going to bother with a year-end post; given that about 60 of the about 80 books I’ve read this year were for the Clarke Award, I wouldn’t have much to say. But I might come up with a recommendation or two.

Perspective

In small online sf magazine Helix, sf author John Barnes argues that sf is dead of simple old age:

And, to return to the observation that might be the point of all this, the good stuff, the stuff that marks the contribution of the genre to the culture as a whole, tends to fall within that about-three-generation span of life. A side observation is that nearly every genre will have its own pet explanations for why it died; the disappearance of the middle-class spontaneous theatergoer and theatrical unions, the cultural change in personal integrity so that no one really believes “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” anymore, girls having better options than becoming nurses and marrying doctors, the generations of civil peace in the nineteenth century draining Gothic novels of their force, and so on and so forth. Science fiction has several versions of this, including rising irrationality, “the world is all science fiction now anyway,” political correctness, political neanderthalism, and “they aren’t like they were when I was a kid.” What I am saying here is this: genres last about seventy years as live things. It was time. Grandma died because she was old, not because you were bad.

[…]

Furthermore, the cultural hole that gave rise to the genre is plugged, now — the genre is plugging it and getting better at plugging it every year. And the culture itself is moving on (Westerns flourished when the frontier was still in living memory, and for perhaps a generation after; the disappearance of the frontier is a quaint historical fact now, but it was a thunderclap in the culture of 1930). The surrounding culture just doesn’t feel the old lack nearly as much. The genre is no longer filling a key place in people’s emotional lives; it’s just something they grew up reading/watching/listening to, comfort food for the brain rather than exotic cuisine.

Meanwhile, in national British newspaper The Times, mainstream author and critic Bryan Appleyard argues that sf is more relevant than ever:

The point is that SF is, in fact, the necessary literary companion to science. How could fiction avoid considering possible futures in a world of perpetual innovation? And how could science begin to believe in itself as wisdom, rather than just truth, without writers scouting out the territory ahead? Which is why this widely despised genre should be read now more than ever. Unfortunately, as Aldiss and Brake agree, this does not seem to be a great time for the production, never mind the reception, of SF. The classical age – of Wells, Lem and Dick – seems to be behind us, and the emerging genre of New Weird, led by Britain’s China Miéville, shades too much into fantasy and horror to be strictly classified as SF, a genre that must remain true to a certain level of logic and realism. But one can try Greg Bear, a practitioner of old-fashioned “hard” SF, the kind that, like the work of Michael Crichton, sticks most closely to real current science. Bear’s celebrated Blood Music is a brilliantly horrible vision of genetics gone wrong. Or there’s another Brit, Stephen Baxter, who writes hard SF strongly influenced by HG Wells; or Iain M Banks (Iain Banks’s SF guise), who has written a series of novels about the Culture, an alien civilisation existing in parallel to the human. Banks’s emphasis is more philosophical than strictly scientific, and seems to descend from the supreme practitioner of philosophical SF, Olaf Stapledon, a man incapable of writing about anything less than everything.

[…]

But if new hard, logical, shingly-beach SF is now a rarity, at least there’s a lot of old stuff to read. The literary snobs will say it’s badly written, which most of it is. So is most “literary” fiction. Badly written literary fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There’s a lot of badly written SF that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is necessary. So, watch Blade Runner for the seventh time, or curl up with Aldiss’s Omnibus. And remember, it’s all happening now.

Comments: I don’t think the world has turned as topsy-turvy as it first appears, because I don’t think Barnes and Appleyard are talking about the same thing. Barnes is talking about genre sf, and he might have a point about its obsolescence; but he goes too far, because even if the genre is dead that says nothing about the health or otherwise of the larger mode, which is what Appleyard seems to be interested in, even if his contemporary examples are all genre sf writers.

I’m actually almost more interested in Appleyard’s assertion that “this does not seem to be a great time for the production […] of sf”. Leaving aside the fact that I’m not sure I could stomach referring to Greg Bear as one of the lights in the darkness (although at the same time, comparing him to Michael Crichton seems cruel even to me), and the fact that I’m not actually even convinced there is a darkness, it says something to me that the commentator sitting outside looking in sees a blip, while the commentator sitting inside looking around sees The End.

Burning Links

  • Sarah Hall’s “tough portrait of life in a near-future Britain after the oil runs out”, The Carhullan Army, has won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, which recognises the best work of literature from Britain or the Commonwealth by an author under 35. Hall talks about the book’s inspiration:

    One novel in particular inspired me in writing Carhullan – Z For Zachariah by Robert O’Brien. Its setting is agricultural, and the human struggle is of a defiant female spirit. I first encountered this novel in my early teens, when I was not a great reader of fiction. I found reading a lonely and difficult undertaking. I was never quite convinced by the worlds portrayed, nor did I did connect with the characters. But this book resonated. Perhaps because it was a novel about being alone and in difficulty, or perhaps because its protagonist was only a little older than me.

  • Matt Cheney points out several conversations about The Book of the New Sun. Waggish:

    But because Gene Wolfe is praised to the skies by many “intellectual” sci-fi fans while being ignored by everyone else, I think he represents a position that is worth exploring. I.e., why is Wolfe still occupying a marginal place in literature in spite of praise from the likes of John Clute and Michael Swanwick, while Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson have made it into the mainstream canon?

    I think there are discernible reasons for this. Wolfe may not be any worse than Stephenson or Gibson, but his particular weaknesses are much more problematic for non-sf readers than theirs.

    Response one; Response two; and separately, OF Blog of the Fallen is focusing on Wolfe.

  • Sarah Monette’s rewatch of the first season of Due South reaches “Victoria’s Secret”.
  • Paul McAuley’s introduction to Alastair Reynolds’ collection Zima Blue and Other Stories: “Before I tell you about Al Reynolds and the stories collected here, I need to say something about the New Space Opera.”
  • Abigail Nussbaum reviews Battlestar Galactica: Razor.
  • Daniel Abraham on the role of setting for fantasy: “There was a time when we read books for excitement. The word itself — novel — is a give-away. Reading was the way people could go places they couldn’t go, see things they’d never seen, experience things they would never do. That role has been taken up by some other media and the relative ease of air travel. For the most part, those of us who are still reading are doing it for comfort.”
  • “Hachette Livre UK is taking the radical step of moving its backlist publishing to a firm sale basis for environmental reasons.” I do not know what this actually means, specifically: is it going to make it easier or harder to find books that are a few years old in bookshops? On Amazon?
  • Andrew Wheeler posts the sales figures for the books in the SF Awards Watch “poll of polls”.
  • Hey look, another unthemed original anthology.
  • Farah Mendlesohn is editing a book of critical essays about fantasy for Cambridge University Press.
  • Contents for The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 2.
  • And finally: “I, Malcolm” (Reynolds).

Eclipse 1

I’ll get the basics done quick. Eclipse 1 is the start (and hopefully not the entirity) of a new, unthemed, original anthology series from Night Shade Books, edited by the not-quite-ubiquitous-yet Jonathan Strahan. It contains fifteen stories, two of which (by Bruce Sterling and Maureen F. McHugh) are excellent, three of which (by Garth Nix, Ellen Klages, and Paul Brandon & Jack Dann) are terrible, and the rest of which fall somewhere in the middle ground. Enough of the pack are on the good side of okay to make the anthology worth reading if you like short stories. In his introduction, Strahan says we’re living in an “extraordinary” time for genre short stories, artistically speaking; for my money there isn’t quite enough weight in Eclipse‘s fiction to support that claim, but what does lend it some credibility is the realisation that it’s trivially easy to sketch out equally impressive hypothetical contents for at least two more volumes before you have to consider repeating yourself.

Or, indeed, the realisation that Eclipse is just one among many. Unthemed anthology series have been popping up everywhere, at least if by “everywhere” you accept that I mean “from smaller publishers, predominantly those based in the US.” Earlier this year Pyr launched Fast Foward, and Solaris has its Best New [Science Fiction|Fantasy]; I’m sure Prime’s offering is on its way. And all the indications are that Eclipse should be most reliably to my taste, given that in general I like Strahan’s choices as an editor. What struck me about Eclipse, though — and this is where the post stops being a review and turns into “thoughts inspired by”; if you want more detail, you could try one of the three (count ’em) reviews in the November Locus — was not the quality of the stories so much as the content. Here’s some more from Strahan’s introduction:

This is not a science fiction anthology. Nor is it a fantasy anthology. It’s both and it’s more. It’s a space where you can encounter rocket ships and ray guns, and zombies and zeppelins: pretty much anything you can imagine. Most of all, it’s somewhere you will find great stories. It does not have an agenda or plan. There is no test of genre purity that it can pass or fail. There’s only the test that every reader applies to any work that they encounter — is it good fiction or not? — and I hope we’ll pass that one every time.

As if to underscore the point, the anthology opens with Andy Duncan’s “Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse”, a historical story which is probably not fantastical at all, and ends with Lucius Shepard’s “Larissa Miusov”, a contemporary story which probably is fantasy, except that we’re not given any proof. In between, despite Strahan’s comment, there is not a single rocket ship, ray gun, or zeppelin; nor are there any scientists or robots or dragons. You could call this the Doctor Who problem: the promise is that the Doctor and his companion could go anywhere and see anything; the reality is that they mostly hang around present-day London. (On the other hand, thank the lord, there aren’t any retold fairytales or myths in Eclipse; or if there were, they were retold inventively enough that I didn’t notice.) There’s a single, solitary zombie, but he doesn’t want brains so much as he wants a drink. Moreover the fantasy stories outnumber the stories that can be read as science fiction two-to-one and, as that phrasing suggests, a reader with a less flexible definition of sf than me could easily make a case for a more unbalanced ratio. Whatever it may have been intended as, what Eclipse actually is is an anthology of mostly contemporary, mostly low-key fantasy, with a sprinkling of near-future sf, and one dose of real, wonderful weirdness.

The dose of weirdness Bruce Sterling’s offering, “The Lustration”. It is set on a planet that is: (1) encompassed by a possibly-sentient computer made out of living wood; (2) part of a solar system, ejected from a galaxy about the size of ours some eighty million years previously, that contains 512 other planets and moons; and (3) inhabited by scaly creatures that call themselves humans. You see the problem in trying to classify it. You can’t, without making a lot of assumptions, position the story as part of our future; you might just as well say it’s set in an alternate dimension where physics happens to be broadly the same as our own. (I’d love to read a fantasy story where it turns out the galactic- or larger-scale cosmology of the universe is radically different to that of ours, though.) I counted it as one of my five above because in subject, if not in setting, it tackles traditional sf matter, because it does so in a traditionally sfnal manner, which is to say through blissfully unnatural interrogative exposition (“You think you’re evil becasue you think humanity matters in this universe!”, says one character), and because it finishes with a good old-fashioned conceptual breakthrough. Similarly, I counted Gwyneth Jones’ future-Fairyland as sf because an sfnal explanation is provided at the end, but the tone of the story is pure fantasy; and I counted McHugh’s “The Lost Boy: A Reporter At Large” as sf despite the fact that the difference between the story’s world and ours is one bomb, and a bomb that turns out to be background at that, which in extrapolative terms makes the story rather less sfnal than the most recent season of 24. (Or makes it a case of SF as affect, if ever I saw one.) When you get right down to it, if you wanted to be really purist, the only story in the book that confronts the reader with an even half-way plausible novum is Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Electric Rains”; another way of describing the book would be to say that although the reading pleasures specific to fantasy are well-served, the pleasures of science fiction are sparse.

“So what?” many will say. Indeed, I’m tempted to say it, too. I cheered the launch of the Strahan-edited Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, not so much for ideological reasons (there is certainly plenty of unclassifiable fantastic fantastic material, as it were, but equally certainly there are distinct literary forms called “science fiction” and “fantasy”) as for practical ones (aside from the high level of conservation of writers between the two forms, they are so often published by the same companies, advertised in the same places and shelved together that it seems artificial to treat them as separate communities). Nor does it bother me that the two volumes of that Year’s Best so far skew fantasy in a 60/40ish ratio. In principle, I’m all for Eclipse‘s mission; and even in practice, as I say, I think it’s a decent book. But the “so what”, for me, is that the book Eclipse is in practice is not the book Eclipse claims to be.

It claims to contain “new science fiction and fantasy”, and to be “in the spirit of classic science fiction anthologies”. The sf is put first, in other words. There’s a clue to the reality in the names on the front cover; these were apparently chosen for being the biggest name authors in the book, but it’s still noticeable that only one of them (Bruce Sterling) is an sf writer, while the other four are fantasy writers (Garth Nix, Peter S Beagle, Jeffrey Ford and Lucius Shepard — not that the last two, at least, haven’t written sf, but they’re better known as fantasists, in the same way that Sterling has written fantasy but is better known as an sf writer; and they contribute fantasy to this book). But the names are somewhat overwhelmed by the other indicators. The cover illustration, for instance, could be for a fantasy story, but the rubble, with its concrete and rust stains and reinforcing metal rods, looks to my eyes more like it belongs in an sf setting. (Moreover, four of the five could-be-read-as-sf stories are by women, compared to only three of the ten fantasy stories; so while the cover names give some idea of the content, they don’t give an accurate idea of the breadth of the writers included. Even with the complete author listing on the back cover, it’s another way in which the book you look at on the table is not the book you sit down to read.) Now, Eclipse didn’t mislead me, but that’s because I’m obsessive and tracked down the full contents before I ordered a copy, and moreover I recognise and have previously read work by every author in the book — my purchase was mostly on the strength of McHugh’s name, as it happens. I was a little disappointed by the preponderance of fantasy — when I buy a book that says “science fiction and fantasy” on the cover, I would prefer to read science fiction and fantasy — but not surprised. But I can’t help thinking that the presentation of Eclipse isn’t doing it any favours in terms of getting the book into the hands of those who will enjoy it most. I can imagine readers looking for sf and fantasy disappointed when they discover only fantasy, or readers who dismiss the collection as a same-old, based on the names on the cover, and miss out on some good and interesting work. And most of all I can imagine readers whose expectations, raised by Strahan’s introduction, colour their reaction when they read the fourth contemporary fantasy in a row, and start to wonder where the rocket ships are. Maybe in Eclipse 2?

Thoughts on the BSI

What’s the BSI, you ask? This is the BSI:

The Big Scary Idea: The Big Scary Business Plan

The quick story: back in late spring of ‘06, Jason sits on my office couch and says, “Think of a way to save science fiction publishing.”

This was the result.

[…]

General Company Description

BSI is the first all-media, advertising-supported speculative fiction website providing both pro-selected and user-rated content with popularity-based revenue sharing for all content providers.

This follows on, of course, from the latest round of discussions about sf magazines and the survival thereof. But you should go and have a look at it, because it’s long, reasonably detailed, will probably answer at least some of the immediate questions you have about it, and in among the community-focused web 2.0 utopianism there’s some food for thought.

So what we have is a one-stop, does-everything website. You go to BSI to read sf stories, watch sf short films, read sf reviews or other related nonfiction, or look at sf art. And because the design is about enabling as much as about providing, you can contribute any of the above yourself. Everything can be rated and commented on. Everything is free-to-browse; the website is funded through a combination of adverts, sponsorships, donations, and a couple of other sources. Contributors then get paid in proportion to how often their stuff gets looked at.

My first reaction is that with the exception of the $1M launch competition, I have very little doubt that this model, or one like it, would work. There doesn’t seem to be much in the proposal that’s new; there are already similarly structured, but not sf-focused, websites making healthy money using these ideas. Moreover, while print prose sf certainly isn’t dead or dying, it is (paging Dr Roberts!) clearly no longer the dominant form in which sf exists. If you are trying to find an audience for sf, focusing on the stuff that’s made of sentences won’t cut it; multimedia is the way to go.

The question in my mind, then, is: is this a website that I would want to visit? These are the people the BSI sees as its audience:

  • Rabid Fan. Science fiction or fantasy reader. Goes to conventions. Gets in heated debates about Star Trek flavors. The middle-aged white male. We don’t want to irritate this person so much that they leave the site. Most likely to donate money to us.
  • Casual Fan. People who enjoy science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies, as well as television such as Buffy and Serenity. Broad range, skewing male. We want to appeal to this person so much they invite their friends to come.
  • Progressive. Someone who’s interested in progressive thoughts, ideas, and futurism, but eschews the fan mentality. Broad range, also skews male. We want to have content that appeals to this person.

Technically speaking, I’m not any of these people. I’m too young to be a rabid fan, but I’m clearly more than a casual fan. (As an aside, I am far from convinced that the ‘casual fan’ category skews male — at least, not judging by TV fandoms as they are represented on my livejournal friendslist, which I admit is not scientific.) Practically speaking, though, I probably do fall into the rabid fan category. I rarely get into debates about which version of Star Trek is best (because it’s obviously DS9), but I go to conventions, I read truckloads, I watch lots of sf television and film, and then I write about it all.

So I’m one of the people that the BSI doesn’t want to irritate so much that I leave the site. However, they’re starting from a disadvantage, in that there are reasons I very rarely visit existing advertising-funded community-oriented sites like Fark and SomethingAwful: it’s because they are usually annoying websites filled with idiots for whom I have very little patience. The community sites that I do use — such as livejournal — are based much more on peer-to-peer interactions than multi-valency community interactions, so I can choose who and what I want to read. In a way, the most optimistic aspect of the BSI, it seems to me, isn’t the financial and business side, it’s the idea that a space can be created where all the various kinds of sf fan that now exist will want to congregate together, when the past decade seems to suggest that most people are more comfortable off in their own multiple splinter fandoms.

Against that, what is there for me at BSI? Short fiction edited by a professional editor — let’s say, for the sake of argument, Ellen Datlow — that’s good. But I didn’t go to the parts of SciFi.com that weren’t SCIFICTION very often, and I still don’t. Would I go there to watch new video? If it was professionally produced, perhaps, but by and large I don’t have much time for fan productions, and when it comes to user-created content I don’t have huge amounts of faith in the wisdom of crowds. Would I go there for discussion and debate? Possibly; but I already have plenty of smart people I can talk to about stuff, and I’m sceptical that such a large site could live up to that level of conversation. Never mind the fact that occasionally — just occasionally — I like to enjoy content that isn’t sf-related. All of which can be boiled down to this: I don’t need another time-sink, and the BSI looks, by design, like a big time-sink.

So to answer my earlier question, no, it’s probably not a site I would want to visit much. The thing is, for the success of the site, that’s irrelevant. The BSI isn’t really aimed at me, and it doesn’t need me. By extension, it probably doesn’t need most of the people reading this; and to create a new, sustainable sf magazine, I suspect that’s exactly the sort of thinking that’s needed.

London Meeting: Iain M Banks

You know, between the BSFA news community, and the shiny new website feed, you barely need me to post these reminders any more. Nevertheless:

The guest at tonight’s BSFA meeting is Iain M Banks, who will be interviewed by Farah Mendlesohn.

The venue for tonight’s meeting is Physics Lecture Theatre 1, Blackett Lab, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus (on the corner of Prince Consort Road and Queensgate), London, SW7 2AZ. Here is a (pdf) map; the Blackett building is no. 7, in the North-West corner of the campus.

As usual, the meeting is open to any and all; it is not ticketed, nor is there an entry fee. Just turning up this evening is fine. The lecture theatre will be open from 6, and the interview will start around 7. Those who want to get a drink beforehand may find like-minded fans in The Hoop & Toy, opposite South Kensington tube.

Politics Is What Humans Do

A little light reading for you: Martin Lewis’ interview of Richard Morgan, from Vector 253:

So your time in Turkey and Spain was helpful to you as a writer?

Yes, very. It’s a powerful shock to the system to go and live in a place where millions of people exist day-to-day on a set of cultural assumptions markedly different from your own. As with seeing the feminist (or more simply the female) perspective on things, you are forced out of your accustomed world-view, forced to consider its validity as against any other. The result is ultimately very empowering – you come away with a far better sense of what is of real value in your own culture, and of what could really do with being changed. Plus (if you can beat your own nasty knee-jerk prejudices) you get an overwhelming sense of common humanity, a (one would think fairly obvious) understanding that at basic levels people are similar wherever you go – but you get that understanding at an emotional rather than an intellectual level. And then of course, there’s the wealth an experience like that brings to your life in terms of getting to know different food, different music, different languages, different kinds of humour … and all of those will feed into your fiction, and make it correspondingly richer, more human and more textured.