I wouldn’t blame my postman if he hated me. He’s never given me cause to believe that he does, on the odd occasions when I actually see him, but I wouldn’t blame him. I got home last night to find one of those we-tried-to-deliver-but-you-were-out cards, with a tick in the too-big-for-your-letterbox box, and a big “X 5!” written in marker pen next to it. So I collected the above pile from my local sorting office on the way to work. The haul:

From bottom to top: that’s Nova Swing and The Green Glass Sea (loans being returned by Chance), Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow (Clarke submission; “an ancient race of lycanthropes survives in modern L.A. … Sharp Teeth is a novel-in-verse that blends epic themes with dark humour, dogs playing cards, crystal meth labs, and acts of heartache and betrayal in Southern California”); The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod, Saturn Returns by Sean Williams, Glasshouse by Charles Stross, and Dark Space by Marianne de Pierres (Clarke submissions all, from Orbit; now, if we can only persude Gollancz to be as efficient); and three Shaun Hutson novels (review copies, for Strange Horizons). Not pictured: my Amazon order, which did get left for me, and consisted of The New Space Opera and Mister Pip. Oh, and that thing in the background is an Orbit messenger bag, “to mark the launch of” their new website. Guess they’re trying to create some buzz after all.

The latest issue of Nature marks the fiftieth anniversary of Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. It includes several pieces of SFnal interest, including the biology in sf roundtable I linked a little while ago, the return of Futures, a short article by Gary K. Wolfe, and a very nice editorial on the relationship between science and science fiction:

Science fiction feeds on science. It also anticipates it. For good or ill, it articulates possibilities and fears: the notion of the super-weapon was commonplace in science fiction long before the Manhattan Project, and no debate about genetic technology seems complete without an appearance by Victor Frankenstein and his creature.

[…]

Yet even though it can be serious and frightening, it is not at heart a literature of warning, either. It is a literature of playfulness. Within the constraint of telling human stories about more-or-less human beings, it revels in the possibility of expanded physical and intellectual horizons.

And above all it revels in the possibility of change. Serious science fiction takes science seriously, and its games provide a way of looking at the subjective implications of newly revealed objective truths of the Universe. Science fiction does not tell us what the future will bring, but at its best it helps us to understand what the future will feel like, and how we might feel when one way of looking at the world is overtaken by another.

To be sure, science fiction doesn’t always connect in this way. It can be tired and cliché-ridden; the games it plays can be tedious, solipsistic power fantasies. And over recent years many of its finest practitioners have become so besotted by the endless new games that ever-accelerating progress allows them to play that their works can be inaccessible to the general reader. To demand that everything be accessible is to demand mediocrity — there is a role for dialogues that can be appreciated only by cognoscenti. But we believe that science fiction written for every scientist can be rewarding, too, which is why this issue sees the return of our popular showcase for short science fiction stories, Futures.

Science takes place in a cultural context. The many forward-looking, ever-changing worlds of science fiction provide one that is both fruitful and enjoyable.

I’ve just spent about an hour I should probably have spent doing other things reading Matt Denault’s thorough, and impressively timely, Readercon report, then looking for other Readercon-related posts. (Having done a Wiscon, Readercon is my next US con target; I’m hoping to make it over next year, though I suspect other things are going to get in the way.) Inevitably, what snagged my eye was the notes on the “Reviewing in the Blogosphere” panel. Here’s the description:

A guide to what’s online, and a discussion of the ways in which online reviewing differs from the print variety. What are the good and bad aspects of the more personal and informal tone of much online criticism?

John Clute, Kathryn Cramer, Jim Freund (M), Ernest Lilley, Tom Purdom, Gordon Van Gelder

While accepting that Matt’s comments are paraphrases of what was said, and that 500 words is necessarily going to leave a lot out, I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed with the way this panel apparently went. You could say the fact that the title doesn’t match up to the description is one warning sign; the makeup of the panel is another. Let’s review.

John Clute needs no introduction. In the online world, he writes a column for Sci-Fi Weekly, occasional reviews for Strange Horizons, and has even posted reviews on his blog … sort of. Kathryn Cramer blogs, and is an editor at NYRSF. Jim Freund is the host of a long-running NY radio show, Hour of the Wolf, in which sf writers and professionals are interviewed; the shows are archived online. Ernest Lilley is Senior Editor at SF Revu; Tom Purdom is a music critic, and writes online for the Broad Street Review, but is obviously better known around these parts as a writer. Gordon Van Gelder is, of course, editor of F&SF, but also wrote a fair number of reviews for NYRSF in its early days. (I have the issue with his piece on “Kirinyaga” in; it’s good.)

This is, in other words, a panel that reads online science fiction reviews more than it writes or edits them, and probably a panel that reads print science fiction reviews more than online science fiction reviews. This is not a problem per se, since it’s a panel of smart people who have written or edited reviews (or both), but you do get the sense that there’s a side of the debate missing. In a comment on the FantasyBookSpot forum, Matt notes that he would have liked to see at least one “respected advocate of blog reviews” on the panel, and I can only agree. Of course, by raising the panel topic here, online, I’ll probably get responses biased in the other direction; but such is life.

On to the specifics of the report:

John Clute led off by saying that he found writing for online publications to be enabling and freeing, in that he could take as many words as needed to convey his review, and his work was less likely to be edited to suit the knowledge and expectations of a singular imagined readership (because online websites are still trying to determine their audiences).

I think freedom is the first thing most people would point to as an advantage of online publication. There is, admittedly, a risk of writing long because you can, rather than because you need to, but it’s a tradeoff worth having. The point about audience is more interesting. Having an audience in mind makes it easier to write — I assume people reading this, for instance, have a certain level of familiarity with the sf field, which is why I said that John Clute should need no introduction; if I assumed my audience was the entire internet, John Clute would almost certainly need an introduction. But this is, perhaps, one way in which online writing is different to print publication: it is possible to write just from a need to say something, and let the audience find you. Or at least, this is possible with blogging; I think online magazines still need to know their audience, if only because the act of calling something a magazine assumes an audience, while a blog, to start with, is an individual.

Gordon Van Gelder commented that the lack of editorial presence at most online websites has led to a proliferation of bad reviews. Tom Purdom agreed about the value of an editor. […] Ernest Lilley mentioned that at the website of which he is the editor, he exerts a high degree of editorial control, hardly ever publishing a negative review and keeping reviews to a limited word count.

Oh, how I wish they were naming names. Or, if they were naming names, how I wish that Matt was reporting them. As you might expect, I strongly disagree with Lilley’s positive-reviews policy. I think constant praise is meaningless, verging on dishonest. As for limited word count, well, we’ve been down that path before. I do agree that brief reviews fill a need, but (a) I think they have to be firmly edited (Rose Fox has some good points on how to write short reviews effectively), and (b) I don’t think they take advantage of online publishing’s strengths, to wit the freedom mentioned earlier. And there are people who take advantage of that freedom. I have some sympathy with Kathryn Cramer’s argument that blogs exert a selection pressure in favour of short, regular posts; but, you know, this is also a world with Eve’s Alexandria and Asking The Wrong Questions in it. Will their content pass Clute’s test, to be worth reading ten years from now? I suspect some of it will, yes.

The other strength of online publishing, of course, is interactivity, and the speed of that interactivity. Which brings me to some of the most baffling of the statements attributed to the panel (not counting Clute’s statement that “contextual links ‘violate the contract of the sentence'”, which just makes it sound like he’s never heard of tabbed browsing):

The panelists talked about the ability that online reviews often grant readers to quickly comment on reviews; the panelists saw this as a negative, as leading people to write reviews in order to have a personal audience.

I would love to get some expansion on this from those on the panel, because I can’t see that it makes any sense at all. One: who else should reviewers write for, if not an audience? Reviewing is about advocacy, about saying “read this book,” or “don’t read this book.” Two: did the panel really think, as this summary seems to indicate, that there are people up there who start review-blogs as a path to internet fame and fortune — or that there is a goldmine of potential serious critics lured away to be superficial bloggers? Because I can’t see much evidence for either position, but I can’t see other ways of interpreting “in order to have a personal audience” as a bad thing. Three: what’s wrong with quick comments? To paraphrase Martin, a review is dead until someone reacts to it, and I don’t see the difference between a comment posted to a blog (or to, say, the reviews published at Locus Online) and a comment emailed to NYRSF.

I’m going to end by quoting the panel description again —

A guide to what’s online, and a discussion of the ways in which online reviewing differs from the print variety. What are the good and bad aspects of the more personal and informal tone of much online criticism?

— and throwing it open to the floor. What’s out there? What’s good and bad about it? Let’s do the panel right here.

Via Graham, an interesting distinction from a Readercon panel, specifically the “real year” panel yesterday.

Advocacy-based sf — “you need to go off and build the future I’m describing”
Recognition-based sf — “this is the world we’re in or arriving at, and we can’t do anything about”

Examples given of advocacy-based sf: classic example Heinlein, current example Kim Stanley Robinson. I don’t know what examples of recognition-based sf they came up with, but I’d imagine something like Ian McDonald’s River of Gods would count, or John Brunner.

Points for discussion:

1. The panel apparently took it as axiomatic that science fiction is either advocacy- or recognition-based. True or false?

(Geneva’s suggested a third category that would cover, e.g. R.A. Lafferty, Cordwainer Smith, some of Lem, or a book like Nova Swing: alienation-based sf. This could be considered a branch of recognition-based sf focused on how it is/would be impossible for us to recognise truly futuristic futures or alien aliens.)

2. John Clute asserted that “characteristic modern sf” is about recognition. True or false? Where do you put a book like Geoff Ryman’s Air, or Charles Stross’s Accelerando?

3. Does the advocacy-recognition split exclude straightforwardly escapist literature (e.g. Star Wars)? Does this matter?

From the latest ansible. I’m not actually sure if this is by Ursula Le Guin, or by Langford after Le Guin sent him the inspirational quote: “Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” But either way it’s rather good.

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly … but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn’t rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn’t rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. […]

And topical, too.

UPDATE, 14/10/07: per Le Guin’s recent letter to Cory Doctorow, I have truncated my quote from OSL. You can (and should) read the whole thing at the Ansible linked above.