Category: links, lists, and snippets

Set These Links In Order

You’d think the internet would slow down a bit this close to Christmas, but I seem to have stacked up enough links for another roundup already, so …

The Rapid Advance of Links

Link to the Evidence

And a brief admin note: the latest BSFA mailing (Vector 249 and Matrix 181) should be on its way to members this coming week. Given what happened with the last mailing, though, we don’t want to take anything for granted, so would appreciate confirmations that it’s shown up from as many people as possible, and in particular from people who didn’t receive V248/M180. As usual, when I get my copy I’ll put the TOC for Vector up here.

(Oh, and I’m going to be out tomorrow evening, so I won’t see the last part of The Martians and Us until the repeat on Wednesday. Expect a discussion on Thursday, though.)

Link Me At Infinity

The Links Our Stuff Is Made Of

1. News from Novacon: Convoy is dead; long live Contemplation.

2. Is there a backlash against Year’s Best books? See recent reviews by Dan Hartland and Paul Kincaid. In the meantime, Jonathan Strahan has announced the table of contents for the book I’ve been waiting for, his Nightshade Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy:

1. “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” by Neil Gaiman
2. “El Regalo” by Peter S. Beagle
3. “I, Row-Boat” by Cory Doctorow
4. “In the House of the Seven Librarians” by Ellen Klages
5. “Another Word for Map is Faith” by Christopher Rowe*
6. “Under Hell, Over Heaven” by Margo Lanagan
7. “Incarnation Day” by Walter Jon Williams
8. “The Night Whiskey” by Jeffrey Ford
9. “A Siege of Cranes” by Benjamin Rosenbaum*
10. “Halfway House” by Frances Hardinge
11. “The Bible Repairman” by Tim Powers
12. “Yellow Card Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi*
13. “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter” (Fantasy) by Geoff Ryman*
14. “The American Dead” by Jay Lake*
15. “The Cartesian Theater” by Robert Charles Wilson
16. “Journey into the Kingdom” by M. Rickert*
17. “Eight Episodes” by Robert Reed*
18. “The Wizards of Perfil” by Kelly Link
19. “The Saffron Gatherers” by Elizabeth Hand
20. “D.A.” by Connie Willis
21. “Femaville 29” by Paul di Filippo
22. “Sob in the Silence” by Gene Wolfe
23. “The House Beyond Your Sky” by Benjamin Rosenbaum*
24. “The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDonald*

I haven’t really read enough short fiction this year to have an opinion about this list. I’ve marked the stories I’ve read, all nine of them, with asterisks; some I would definitely have picked (“The Djinn’s Wife” is probably the best of Ian McDonald’s three River of Gods-related stories; “Yellow Card Man” is probably the best story Paolo Bacigalupi has published so far, full stop), some I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t (including, and I recognise I’m in a small minority here, “Journey Into the Kingdom”, which seemed quite a bit below M. Rickert’s best to me; ditto “The American Dead”). But it’s long past time we had an all-under-one-roof Year’s Best book, so I’m still eager to get my hands on this.

3. Miscellaneous links: John Clute reviews Nova Swing, M. John Harrison’s latest novel (in the Guardian!); a very disturbing video for any Calvin and Hobbes fans; the history of SFBC original anthologies; an interview with Catherynne M. Valente; I Read A Short Story Today; Charlie Brooker on UK SF TV (and BBC4’s SF season in particular); Abigail Nussbaum on Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett.

4. The Prestige. I saw this on Friday and have been processing it since. It’s a good film, very neatly put together, with good performances from Christian Bale and Rebecca Hall, and it does, I think, a remarkably good job of translating Christopher Priest’s novel to the screen. Given that I had some reservations about the book, this means I also have some reservations about the film, such as the fact that when you get down to it the whole thing is a Star Trek “transporter malfunction” episode in fancy dress. Of course, Nolan’s cut out the present-day frame. The replacement frame, and the nesting of other frames within that, works well, but necessitates some changes in emphasis that I think, on balance, makes the film’s portrayal of magic less sophisticated than the novel’s. Some elements that are quite obvious from early on in the book are obscured in the film. Arguably, Nolan actually does a better job than Priest of handling the inevitability of the prestige, the fact that you know you’re going to be tricked — in fact, you know what the trick is going to be: the girl is going to get out of the locked box — and remain impressed when it happens anyway. But the way he does so is somewhat at the expense of the analysis and critique of storytelling that I liked in the book. And not everyone gets it. Here’s Peter Bradshaw, for instance, missing the point entirely:

“Prestige”, a magicians’ technical term invented by author Christopher Priest for his original 1995 novel, means the crowning moment of a trick. It’s the gasp-inducing climactic flourish, the moment whose devastating impact has to be guarded as closely as possible before detonation. So it is odd that the prestige of this film, the trick ending, is gradually given away over the final 40 or so minutes in a series of extended takes and giveaway closeups. Why? Because the director figured we were going to guess anyway?

If you’ve already read the book and seen the film, see Gary Westfahl’s review at Locus Online for a more thorough and interesting take.

Now All Tiptree Until The End (Last updated 18/12/06)

Origin Story

Fiction

Commentary

Miscellania

Like the slipstream links post, this is deliberately a work-in-progress; suggestions for further additions are welcomed.

Linksight

Living Next-Door To The God Of Links

Blogging continues to be light around these parts. In the meantime:

EDIT: Good lord, already? Rich Horton has started posting his annual magazine summaries: Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF. Interesting that the general opinion seems to be that F&SF has pulled away from Asimov’s again; I actually thought the two magazines were more evenly matched than they’ve been for a few years. But then, I’ve been cherry-picking what I read, not going through every story.

Socialism and Social Critique in Science Fiction

A little while ago, we were contacted by Socialism and Democracy about a potential ad swap to highlight their latest issue, which focuses on sf. It didn’t work out because of the timing of the print deadlines, but they very kindly sent me a complimentary copy. The introduction to the issue is available online:

This whole range of potentially subversive processes is grounded in the experience incisively identified by Darko Suvin, more than thirty years ago, as cognitive estrangement. Works conceived in this tradition are the ones in which we find promise. The character of such works, as Carl Freedman has written, “lies neither in chronology nor in technological hardware but in the cognitive presentation of alternatives to actuality and the status quo.” Insofar as we focus on this dimension of science fiction, we encounter a body of work with obvious relevance to the concerns of socialists. This link has been expressed historically in many ways. One striking instance of it, noted by Suvin, is the presence, at key points in Marx’s writings, of figures like vampires, monsters, sorcerers, and specters. The point here is perhaps that even in the most materialist of analyses, there needs to be a vocabulary to encompass the dimensions of behavior that appear, from one limited class-perspective or another, to be beyond the range of calculable human intervention. Beyond this, though, there is a long and proud tradition of consciously radical SF writing or storytelling, some of which is discussed and illustrated in articles in this collection.

And here’s the table of contents:

Issue #42 (Vol 20, No. 3)

  • Preface by the Editors
  • Science Fiction as Popular Culture: A Sense of Wonder by Yusuf Nuruddin
  • Introduction by Victor Wallis

Radical Readings

  • Steven Shaviro, Prophecies of the Present
  • Carl Freedman, Speculative Fiction and International Law: The Marxism of China Mieville
  • Lisa Yaszek, Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future
  • Alcena Madeline Davis Rogan, Alienation, Estrangement, and the Politics of “Free Individuality” in Two Feminist Science Fictions: A Marxist Feminist Analysis
  • Dennis M. Lensing, The Fecund Androgyne: Gender and the Utopian/Dystopian Imagination of the 1970s
  • Jonathan Scott, Octavia Butler and the Base for American Socialism

Politics & Culture in the US

  • Yusuf Nuruddin, Ancient Black Astronauts and Extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic Science Fiction as Urban Mythology
  • Marleen S. Barr, Science Fiction and the Cultural Logic of Early Post Postmodernism
  • Robert P. Horstemeier, Flying Saucers Are Real! The US Navy, Unidentified Flying Objects, and the National Security State

Technological Futures

  • Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould, All That Melts Into Air Is Solid: Rematerialising Capital in Cube and Videodrome
  • Michael G Bennett, The Adoxic Adventures of John Henry in the 21st Century

Reviews

  • Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions reviewed by Alcena Madeline Davis Rogan
  • Sheree Thomas, ed., Dark Matter I: A Century of Speculative
    Fiction from the African Diaspora    ; Sheree Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: Reading the Bones; and Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, eds, So Long
    Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy     reviewed by Yolanda Hood
  • Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilan, eds, Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain reviewed by Aaron Dziubinskyj

Some interesting-looking articles there.

Take Back Links

  • A not-terribly-good review of Susanna Clarke’s collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, although I’m glad someone else has reservations about the illustations. A much better review by Ursula Le Guin.
  • Also from the Guardian, an article about our obsession with awards.
    Discuss, with particular reference to science fiction and fantasy (20 marks).

    Prizes are becoming the ultimate measure of cultural success and value. One prize inevitably spawns another, in imitation or reaction, as the perceived male dominance of the Booker spawned the Orange Prize for women’s fiction. There are now so many, in so many different fields, that it can be difficult to find a professional artist, writer or journalist who has not been shortlisted for a prize.
    […]
    In the book world, prizes have long since supplanted reviews as our primary means of literary transmission, and now they are taking on the task, from the professional critics, of judgment as well.

  • Gabe Chouinard responds to some of the points raised by Charlie Stross in the post I linked on Saturday. Semi-relatedly, two good posts by Paul McAuley.
  • Abigail Nussbaum on Heroes and Studio 60.
  • Reactions to Torchwood: here, here, here, and here. (None of which I’ve actually read, since I haven’t seen it yet; as much as anything this is a list for me to come back to later.)
  • Some thoughts on China Mountain Zhang, by me, for the Instant Fanzine book group. One thing that post doesn’t mention: I was scandalised to discover it wasn’t even nominated for the Clarke.