The BSFA Apologises

The BSFA would like to apologise for a tweet made by one of its committee members on Friday 2nd September. As has been stressed from outset, we do not endorse either the choice of wording or the sentiments expressed in the offending tweet.

The BSFA committee is composed of a group of volunteers, all of whom are passionate about science fiction, all of whom are individuals with their own distinct views. In this regrettable instance a very personal viewpoint was expressed by one such using a personal account, but one still seen as closely linked to the organisation.

This should not have happened and steps have been taken to ensure that it does not happen again. A letter of apology was also sent to Mr Moffat, the victim of the malicious tweet, the same day. Mr Moffat has responded very graciously, assuring us that he understands the circumstances and has taken no offence with the BSFA.

Nonetheless, the BSFA do wish to apologise sincerely to all those who were offended on Mr Moffat’s behalf.

Robert Holdstock Booklet followup

Last night, there was a roundtable discussion at the British Library in honour of Robert Holdstock, entitled “Heartwood: Telling the Matter of Britain”. It featured Stephen Baxter, Lisa Tuttle, Donald E Morse, Paul Kincaid (filling in for Brian Aldiss), and was chaired by Graham Sleight.

At it, Graham mentioned that the BSFA produced a booklet in memory of Holdstock earlier this year. Further, Stephen Baxter, BSFA President (among other things), read an excerpt or two from the booklet, from an interview which Paul Kincaid did with Rob.

Into the Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered

An Answer? – An Introduction by Paul Kincaid
Trone’s Wood – A Poem by Robert Holdstock
The Memory of Stories – Robert Holdstock interviewed by Paul Kincaid
Robert Holdstock: A Roundtable Discussion – With Niall Harrison, Stephen Baxter, Paul Kincaid, David Schwartz, and Liz Williams

If you were not a BSFA member at the time of that mailing and are interested in getting a hold of it, we still have some copies left! Contact Martin McGrath – martin@martinmcgrath.net.

Cat Women of the Moon, Part 1 – Bibliography

Cat Women of the Moon, the two-part documentary of science fiction and sex hosted by Sarah Hall, was on BBC Radio 4 just now. (Part 2 will be next Tuesday at 11:30 BST).

Part way through the episode, I realized that this was a prime opportunity for book recommendations, and to consider just what the show has collectively mentioned. Here, then, for your contemplation, are the books mentioned in the program for whatever reason.

The programme is now available on Listen Again.

Nicola Griffith, Slow River
Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
Mike Ashley, Out of this World: Science Fiction but Not as You Know It
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jane Webb Loudon, The Mummy, or A Tale of the Twenty-second Century
Joanna Russ, The Female Man
Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army
Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden
George Orwell, 1984
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Iain M Banks, The Player of Games
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Isaac Asimov, Robot series
Bram Stoker, Dracula (Mentioned in such a way it could be a film reference instead)
John Christopher, Death of Grass

Also, in other media, Bladerunner, the titular movie, Cat Women of the Moon,and Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco of the Creation of Man.

Awards to come

This weekend’s awards were the Hugos. (See the survey of initial reactions at Strange Horizons.) The UK and the UK SF community did fairly well out of them, even if this country-as-setting was, by many accounts, the weak point in the best novel winner of Blackout/All Clear. Still, between Claire Brialey, James Bacon, Dr Who episodes, and relatedly Chicks Dig Time Lords, Britain would not have done half badly, if this were a country contest. Which it is not.

But the BSFA awards are to some degree, and, although BSFA members can nominate year-round for them, we are coming up to that time of year when nominations are officially open for the awards: the beginning of September.

In the meantime, the rules and guidelines for the 2012 BSFA awards have just gone live over on the BSFA website.

August: Life

It’s the eighth month of the year already* and we’re still back in 2004 in reading the Future Classics here on Torque Control.

August’s book is Gwyneth Jones’ Life. It is the second of two books from 2004 (the other was City of Pearl) and one of three by Jones on our list this year. It did very well for itself, winning the Philip K Dick award for that year and being shortlisted for the Tiptree Award.

Nic of Eve’s Alexandria, a new poster on Torque Control, should be joining us to discuss the book before the end of the month. I hope you will join us in reading and discussing it!

* It’s almost still the first half of the month, right?

City of Pearl: Recap

The book of this long, lingering July* was Karen Traviss’s City of Pearl, which Niall discussed in a series of posts. It was the first of two 2004 books we are reading here at Torque Control this year as part of the Future Classics series of the best science fiction novels written by women in the previous decade.

Niall examined the difficulty of writing aliens, especially with respect to gender; the role of humans in the context of those aliens, and the problems with the way the book presents scientists; an examination of the main viewpoint character, Shan Frankland; and a look at a few of the book’s other major themes and the way they affect the conclusion.

Continuing the post-9/11 notes, this book too had a plot thread about terrorism, by that name, in the context of moral ambiguities.

My thanks to Niall for the thoughtful examination of this book, and to all of you who joined in the discussion about it. (There’s always time to do so in future weeks… or months… or years.)

Discussion: Part I (Aliens); Part II (Environment and humanity); Part III (Characters); Part IV (Transparency)

I can’t, offhand, find any other discussions of this novel online from the last month, which is why I am not providing them for you this month. (I though I did run across another fantastical “city of Pearl” as a result: more in Jeff VanderMeer’s post here.)

* Summer, with all its life disruptions to put us in places we aren’t normally and disrupt posting habits.

Vector 267

Go away for a week, and all sorts of things happen! Vector 267 arrived while I was traveling. Most people seem to have received their copies on Saturday, although a fair minority of those were partially soaked from the ongoing rains.

This quarter’s mailing includes, in addition to Vector, a booklet of Maureen Kincaid Speller’s writings, edited by Jonathan McCalmont and laid out by Martin McGrath.

This issue contains a broad assortment of intriguing and (I hope) thought-provoking content, including a few pieces, including Sam Mardon’s elegant cover, in honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Arthur C Clarke Award.

Table of Contents

Matrix: A Magazine out of Time, Ian Whates
Introducing The BSFA Review, Martin Lewis
Sci-Fi London in 2011 in REview, Alys Sterling
Against Utopia: Arthur C Clarke and the Heterotopian Impulse
Homer’s Odyssey: The World’s First Fantasy Novel?, Juliet E McKenna
An Interview with Samuel R Delany, Roz Kaveney
Avatar: The New Fantastic Horizons of Oneiric Justice, Roberto Quaglia, trans. Teo Popescu
Kincaid in Short, Paul Kincaid
Now and Then, Terry Martin
Resonances, Stephen Baxter
Foundation Favourites, Andy Sawyer

The BSFA Review, edited by Martin Lewis
Reviews

The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sheryl Vint (Routledge, 2009) – Reviewed by Glyn Morgan
The Mervyn Stone Mysteries: Geek Tragedy, DVD Extras Include: Murder and Cursed Among Sequels by Nev Fountain (Big Finish, 2010) – Reviewed by Gary Dalkin
Sci-Fi London Film Festival: Dinoshark (2010), Sharktopus (2010), One Hundred Mornings (2009), Zenith (2010), Gantz (2011) and Super (2010) – Reviewed by Martin McGrath
Ignition City, written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Gianluca Pagliarani (Avatar, 2010) – Reviewed by James Bacon
Twin Spica: Volume 1 by Kou Yaginuma (Vertical, 2010) – Reviewed by Nick Honeywell
Mardock Scramble by Tow Ubukata, translated by Edwin Hawkes (Haikasoru, 2011) – Reviewed by Alan Fraser
Gantz (2011) – Reviewed by Lalith Vipulananthan
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (Harper Voyager, 2010) – Reviewed by Dan Hartland
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Orbit, 2010) – Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers (Corvus, 2011) – Reviewed by Paul Kincaid
The Broken Kingdoms by NK Jemisin (Orbit, 2010) – Reviewed by Sandra Unerman
The Dragon’s Path by Daniel Abraham (Orbit, 2011) – Reviewed by Sue Thomason
The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz, 2011) – Reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller
The Scarab Path by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor, 2010) – Reviewed by Nic Clarke
The Wolf Age by James Enge (Pyr, 2010) – Reviewed by A.P. Canavan
Blood and Iron by Tony Ballantyne (Tor, 2010) – Reviewed by David Towsey
The Evolutionary Void by Peter F Hamilton (Pan MacMillan, 2010) – Reviewed by Martin Potts
Point by Thomas Blackthorne (Angry Robot, 2011) – Reviewed by Alan Fraser
Embedded by Dan Abnett (Angry Robot, 2011) – Reviewed by Stuart Carter

Vector welcomes letters of comment, or feedback on the forum.

Best novels of 2011 so far

I knew it was halfway through the year when my thing-a-day calendar required flipping on the fourth of July. And halfway through means another quarter has passed and you have read more books.

Back in April, these were the books suggested for next year’s award nominations:

Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Published 2011 in the US)
Daniel Abraham’s The Dragon’s Path
James S.A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes.
Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes.
Jo Walton’s Among Others
Andrea Hairston’s Redwood & Wildfire

Are these still the best contenders for next year’s novel awards, or have new books trumped or added to them since? What would you nominate as of now?

July: City of Pearl

I exaggerated a little about 2003. It is pretty astonishing that three books out of the 11 best science fiction by women from the last decade were published then, but it was part of a larger lumping in the decade. Two more of the novels on the list came out in 2004, adding to my mild suspicions about how we mentally process novels, and how long it takes to pass judgement on a book’s staying power while still remembering that one has read it. It would be interesting to do similar surveys every five years and see how they evolve.

In any event, this month on Torque Control, we will be looking at Karen Traviss‘s novel, City of Pearl. Given how prolific Traviss has been since, it’s worth remembering that City of Pearl was her very first published novel, one of two which came out in 2004. Also note that it has not been published in the UK, although used copies are certainly available here. Her Wess’har War series, which it begins, would have five more volumes by 2008.

Traviss will be at ComiCon in San Diego later this month. She was also part of a three-way interview on Women’s Hour of BBC4 in June, which Niall transcribed here.

And speaking of Niall, he’s the one who will be leading discussion of City of Pearl later in July. I hope you will be able to join us in reading and discussing it.

Maul – Recap

You can tell it’s summer. We’re busy, but not always in the ways we are the rest of the year.

In any event, June now comes to an end, having taken a bite out of July in the process. For June, we read Tricia Sullivan’s Maul, the last of the 2003 novels from chronological exploration of the best science fiction novels written by women in the previous decade which we are reading here at Torque Control over the course of this calendar year. 2003 really was astonishing, with the publication of, in addition to Maul, Natural History and The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Tony Keen, a new Torque Control contributor, examined the book over a series of posts, beginning with the vexed question of just what constitutes reality in the book; continuing with a consideration of feminism and violence in the novel; and then discussing the central role which branding played in the writing and world-building of Maul.

My thanks to Tony for leading the discussion! And thank you to all who joined in – never to late to go back and do so! – in reading or re-reading Maul.

Discussion: Part 1 (What is reality?), Part 2 (“the new face of Feminist sf”), and Part 3 (Product placement)

Some other recent posts/reviews on Maul:
Martin Lewis on the first chapter of Maul.
He also notes that Maul is out of print, and Sullivan is out of contract only eight years later.
Val Guichon at Valunivers