We interrupt this Vector blog to bring you a brief post about Strange Horizons. For anyone who hasn’t been following Lamoragate, here’s a recap:

1. A review

2. A response

3. A second response

4. The reviewer’s response to the first response

5. A rant

6. The author comments

7. A response to the rant

8. A meta-response (possibly)

9. Infamy!

10. A response that is longer than all the other responses put together

(UPDATED) 11. Another response by the author of the first response, which is a response to the responses to that response

(FURTHER UPDATED) 12. Now all responses until the end (and none more meta)

I think that’s the lot. Let me know if I’ve missed any.

A couple of comments on the original EmCit thread aside, I’ve been holding off making any kind of a public statement about this, since I’m the guy that accepted and edited the original review. But I figure there are a few points worth noting.

One: there was no intent to cause controversy by publishing the review, and no intent to criticise specific individuals.

Two: Perhaps I have an unusually thick skin, but it simply never occurred to me that anyone would read the statement in this review about lies and bribes as anything other than hyperbole. Because whatever grains of truth there are underlying it, to me it’s clearly an exaggeration to the point of absurdity. I don’t think it’s just blind optimism to believe that these days, most sf reviewers are working to their own version of the protocol of excessive candour; or to think that in general sf criticism, online and off, formal and informal, is as healthy as it’s ever been; nor to be sceptical of the idea that there are widespread assumptions to the contrary that this review is going to reinforce.

Three: For reviewers it can certainly be challenging to do what Clute’s called “swab the decks”; to bring an independent, honest perspective to–or to not be a little suspicious of–a book that has been actively hyped, or even just widely praised. I know the feeling, whether reviewing a high-profile title, or a book edited by a friend. But it’s something that we have to do, as part of earning the reader’s trust, so I think it’s a subject worth talking about.

And four: ironically, I’m currently reading The Lies of Locke Lamora myself, and quite enjoying it.

1. John Scalzi has a fascinating post on “Why there are no great video game critics (yet).” His first argument is that they aren’t yet a mature medium, which is probably true; he notes that it took several decades for mature film and pop music criticism to start appearing (the same is probably true for genre sf, even though it was a subset of an existing form, prose fiction: Astounding 1926, Damon Knight 1952). On the other hand, as a general rule I do think we’re feeling the lack of such criticism today. One of the things Adam Roberts argues in his Palgrave History of Science Fiction is that just as the novel supplanted the short story as the dominant form of sf in the mid 20th century, so film and tv have started to supplant the novel, if they haven’t done so already. I think you can quite easily add computer games, and possibly comics, to ‘film and tv.’ One of my formative sf experiences was playing the later Final Fantasy games on the PS2, for instance—it’s clearly going to become increasingly untenable to talk about sf as a cultural discourse while considering prose fiction in isolation. I’m not saying all critics have to know about everything, and neither am I saying that written sf is going away, but … already we have stories like Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners,” which is part of a dialogue with a tv series (Buffy), or David Marusek’s Counting Heads, which is more-or-less consciously structured like a season of US tv; and we have writers like Sean Stewart and Neil Gaiman who happily hop, skip and jump between multiple media.

2. Andrew Wheeler, a senior editor at the Science Fiction Book Club, posts a list of “The Great SF Novels of the 90s.” Context: the SFBC has been reprinting eight books a year from successive decades each year for the past four years. As preparation, each time he’s surveyed readers of RASFW, and latterly his blog, about their preferences, to get ideas. He cuts the data several different ways, but some books keep showing up, as you’d expect—Snow Crash, A Fire Upon The Deep, The Sparrow, Red Mars, Use of Weapons. What’s a little embarrassing, considering this is supposed to be my period, is the number of books and even writers coming up that I’m not very familiar with. I haven’t read Hyperion, or The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, for instance, and very little Bujold, George RR Martin, or Connie Willis. On the other hand, it’s a pretty US-centric list, as you would expect; it doesn’t look complete to me without something by Stephen Baxter, and probably Ken Macleod and Greg Egan as well. What do you think’s missing, though?

3. All hail the Robot Pope!

“But wait!” you say. “The Robot Pope will have bugs!” But that’s where you’re wrong. The only way to really ensure the Robot Pope is as bug-free and as accurate as possible is to create an open-source pope architecture.

1. Some interesting discussion at Gabe Chouinard’s journal last week about the lack of online sf criticism. Oh, there are a number of pretty good review sites (Vector‘s reviews are also excellent, of course, but we’re still primarily a print journal), not to mention some excellent bloggers who write about sf at least some of the time. But aside from Excessive Candour and the archive of SF Studies, and the odd individual essay, there’s precious little depth—and while I don’t think that originality is the be-all and end-all of criticism, there’s something to be said for knowing what the major critical voices in the field have been saying. Oddly enough, and despite being a child of the online age through and through, I can also understand some of the reasons why people might be reticent to put their work online. When you publish in print there’s a disconnect between you and the reader. If someone corrects me on something (as Tony Keen did with a review I wrote for Foundation), it’s usually a couple of months after I wrote it or even after it was published, and it doesn’t have so much sting. When I put something up here, anyone can wander by and tell me I’m a wronghead instantly. (On the other hand, that’s also the thrill of it.)

2. Kameron Hurley wonders where the popular radical feminist books are, or why The Left Hand of Darkness seems to be the only one people name. In fact, she raises a number of related issues, each of which probably has a different answer. On the question of why The Left Hand of Darkness is The Book That Everyone Talks About when it comes to having their eyes opened about gender relations, well, it’s probably partly just how reputation works—it’s self-perpetuating; plus the groupmind only has room for one book at a time—and probably partly down to the fact that you can only have your mind truly blown a limited number of times. (Although see also.)

On the question of where the modern equivalents are, I think Susan Marie Groppi’s report from the Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago panel at Wiscon is probably an accurate assessment of the changing goalposts for feminist fiction, radical or otherwise. On the question of genderfucking books specifically, there seem to be to be a few related trends in what’s being written, which at root all turn on Cheryl Morgan‘s point that what is radical becomes familiar. First, in sf at large, it’s now pretty common to see books like River of Gods, where the presence of agendered individuals is just one part of a multivariate future (tm Graham, possibly); or books like Iain Banks’ Culture novels, where gender-switching has been taken on board as one component of a utopia; or books like Justina Robson’s Living Next-Door to the God of Love, where fluidity of gender is a glancing reflection of a more general fluidity of identity. (Not to mention what happens to gender in the Eganesque or Strossian posthuman futures; although see Elizabeth Bear’s feminist critique of the singularity.) Second, and more tenuously, I think it’s possible we’ve started to see more mainstream examinations of gender identity—I’m thinking of books like Matt Ruff’s Set This House in Order, or Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. And third, you get more explicitly feminist sf books like Gwyneth Jones’s Life, which you could describe as being a hard-sf take on the ramp-up to a genderfuck singularity, with brilliant (if somewhat frustrating) characters: books that know they can’t just restate the problem, but have to look for mechanisms by which change could happen.

All of that said, the name that kept coming to mind while reading Hurley’s post was Tricia Sullivan, who seems to me to mix intelligence, style and passion in the right quantities to achieve a more general popularity without shortchanging her ideas (or ideals). Neither of the two novels I’ve read by her so far (Maul and Double Vision) have been complete home runs, but both are very good; and I still have the Clarke Award-winning Dreaming in Smoke on my to-be-read pile.

3. I’ve been meaning to post something about Bruce Sterling’s uneven but interesting collection, Visionary in Residence, but I don’t think I’m going to have time to work my thoughts up into a full post or review. So, instead I will link to two thoughtful reviews elsewhere, by James Trimarco and Paul Kincaid, neither of which I really agree with. Both reviews spend a fair amount of time talking about the two ribofunk stories—perhaps not surprisingly, since they’re two of the most substantial stories in the book. But both are also co-written (‘The Scab’s Progress‘ with Paul di Filippo, and ‘Junk DNA’ with Rudy Rucker) and both, I think, show evidence of that, being flabby and over-excited. The two most satisfying stories for me, and the two that I think best fulfill the promise of Sterling’s introduction, in which he says that being an sf writer “is an excuse to get up to any mischief imaginable”, are ‘Luciferase‘ and ‘User-Centric’. The former comes on like a scientifically literate version of A Bug’s Life; it’s tremendous fun, and a more brazen incorporation of science into story than you usually see. The latter, an email exchange between a group of designers which segues into the story they have been designing, is interesting because it’s so literal a guided tour to the process of creating science fiction. And because it refuses to end: it ends with one character telling another that, “There are no happy endings. Because there are no endings. There are only ways to cope.” Sf, of all forms of writing, should hold to that sentiment more often than it does, I think.

4. Nic Clarke at Eve’s Alexandria reviews Peace by Gene Wolfe. This is my “Gene Wolfe’s last chance” book. I read The Fifth Head of Cerberus and found it dry as dust and less than the sum of its parts; I read The Wizard-Knight and found it enervating, massively longer than the points it was making needed or deserved; I read the stories in Starwater Strains, and the odd older piece here and there, and found some of them unutterably brilliant, and some of them complete bobbins. Peace is the other book I have a copy of, the other one I’m planning to read at some point, before making a final decision about whether it’s worth embarking on The Book of the New Sun (and associated work) or not.

5. Yesterday I went to see Thank You For Smoking, a satire about a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart). Part of the plot has him meeting with “Hollywood Superagent” Jeff Megall (Rob Lowe); the sf connection is the scene at the end of the trailer:

Jeff Megall: Sony has a futuristic sci-fi movie they’re looking to make.
Nick Naylor: Cigarettes in space.
Jeff: It’s the final frontier, Nick.
Nick: But wouldn’t they blow up in an all-oxygen environment?
Jeff: … Probably. [beat] But, it’s an easy fix—one line of dialogue. “Thank God we invented the …” you know.
Nick: Whatever.
Jeff: Device.

I genuinely cannot tell whether including a science error (space stations don’t have all-oxygen environments) in a gag about how quickly factual accuracy goes out the window when confronted with product placement is a screw up, or an apt and None More Ironic dig at sf films in general. The rest of the film was pretty good, so I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Back in January this year Niall and I decided we wanted to approach Judith Berman to write an article on the topic of cultural appropriation for our international issue. That issue has now gone to press and as soon as it's been posted out to BSFA members we'll be putting Judith's article 'Bears, Bombs and Popcorn: Some considerations when mining other cultures for source materials' up on the Vector website. The other feature article we'll be publishing online from that issue is Nisi Shawl's 'Colourful Stories: Fantastic Fiction by African Descended Authors', in which she discusses her picks for some of the best sf and fantasy stories by writers of African descent.

Unfortunately, due to the delays caused by the problems with the mailing house, the international issue didn't make it out in time to coincide with all the online discussions of cultural appropriation following on, apparently, from a panel at Wiscon on the subject (which Judith Berman was on). Some of the online discussion I saw got pretty badly derailed (for an excellent summary of what happened and why it was problematic, read Oyce's post) so I hope that Judith's article, when it goes up, will contribute some really good, focused thoughts on the matter of cultural appropriation as an issue for writers to the ongoing debate.

Judith is a fiction writer, and in her article she talks about her experiences of writing fiction about other cultures and the issues relating to cultural appropriation that she has found herself considering in the process. I do think it's important for writers to think about and talk about these issues from a writerly perspective, which is why I was keen on the idea of asking Judith to contribute an article on the subject to Vector in the first place. But I'm also of the opinion that I have a responsibility, as an editor and as a reviewer, to think and talk about these sorts of issues too, from my perspective.

One of my jobs as an editor, as I see it, is to create a forum where people can have much-needed discussions about important matters such as cultural appropriation. To create a forum where people can feel comfortable bringing up and addressing issues that might be difficult to talk about. To create a forum where voices, especially voices that aren't often heard, can speak. In practical terms, this means inviting the discussion of cultural appropriation into the forum Niall and I are creating with Vector, by commissioning articles on the issue and blogging about it.

My role as an editor is as a facilitator for the discussion, but the role of reviewer I sometimes take up is part of that discussion. It's important for me, as a reviewer, to be able to recognise cultural appropriation, because if I don't recognise it and fail to point it out then I'm colluding with it, becoming part of the appropriation. Though that sounds as if there's a clear cut line – this is cultural appropriation, this isn't – and I don't think that's the case at all. In fact, I'd guess that the most common role as a reviewer participant in discussions of cultural appropriation is the role of asking the question of a work: is this a case of cultural appropriation? There might not be a clear cut answer to the question in most cases, but in attempting to address it a reviewer may hopefully illuminate some of the factors involved in appropriating culture that we should be alert to.

So, what is cultural appropriation, then, if we're to recognise it when we do see it? In my mind, only a dominant culture can appropriate other cultures. So when we're talking about cultural appropriation we're mostly talking about members of the dominant Western culture appropriating from cultures that are minorities in the Western world. The way a reviewer approaches a work and asks questions about its relationship to its cultural sources will therefore inevitably begin by establishing what culture the work primarily sits in and thinking about how it relates to the culture it's using as its source of inspiration from its primary cultural position.

According to Yoon Ha Lee's report on the Wiscon panel, one of the panel participants, Ekaterina Sedia, when talking about how to go about writing other cultures without appropriating them, said something about needing to understand the culture you're writing about, acknowledge it as the source of inspiration for your work, and be aware of how you're presenting it. I think these points are useful things for reviewers to think about. If the cultural inspiration behind a work goes unacknowledged, but the reviewer spots it, then I think it's the duty of that reviewer to point out the work's cultural sources and ask about its relationship with that culture. If the cultural sources behind a work are acknowledged, then I think it's the reviewer's duty to do at least some reading about that culture before sitting down to review the work. A reviewer will only be able to think about how well an author has understood and presented a culture if they know a bit about that culture to begin with. Admittedly, it's sometimes going to be tricky to be able to tell whether a writer has failed to understand a culture or whether they've made their own creative alterations to the aspects of the culture they've chosen to work with in the full understanding of what it is that they're altering, but this is why it's worth considering how they've presented that culture as well as whether they understand it. It's not really a matter of understanding, it's a matter of what comes across in the writing, but obviously a good understanding will help make sure the presentation of the aspects of the source culture used is respectful.

This month’s Internet Review of SF has an overview by Lavie Tidhar of UK small press publishing in 2005. Interesting reading, although it’s weak on the nonfiction side; it misses, for example, the two books that the Science Fiction Foundation published last year, not to mention the excellent Soundings. But the larger point is that, aside from PS Publishing, TTA Press, and one or two others, I’d been under the impression that there wasn’t really a UK small press scene. Certainly not in comparison to the proliferation of US ‘zines–LRCW, Say …, Rabid Transit, Electric Velocipede, Flytrap–and presses–Nightshade, Golden Gryphon, Subterranean, Small Beer (are they still small?)–and so forth. This article suggests otherwise. Plus, we now also have Farthing, which if nothing else (I haven’t read issues 2 and 3 yet) has some very pretty covers.

Lou Anders likes new Who whereas, as I suspect most people reading this will be well aware, I don’t. I keep watching it partly because everyone else keeps going on about it and I don’t want to feel left out, and partly because every so often it’s almost good. Steven Moffatt’s ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ earlier this season was one such occasion; the most recent two-parter has been another. I’m down with the whole pulpy-sci-fi-horror bit, really I am, and it had plenty of atmosphere. Unfortunately it was also deeply stupid. The “impossible orbit” was my favourite bit of nonsense, until someone pointed out to me that the ventilation shafts they were crawling through on Saturday–the ones where they had to keep pressurising and depressurising different segments–had handy mesh grates connecting them to the rest of the ship.

It’s Dave Itzkoff time again. This time he’s tackling the latest Nebula anthology. There’s a roundup of previous kerfuffle here, but I don’t think this review is going to inspire anything like the same sort of reaction. Not because it’s particularly less critical–he’s less than wild about a number of the stories, although he’s also effusive in his praise of Christopher Rowe’s ‘The Voluntary State‘ and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s ‘Embracing-the-New‘–but because he’s done a better job of grounding the subject he wants to talk about in the book under review. Geekiness in science fiction is certainly an issue, but Counting Heads seemed the wrong book to demonstrate it; nostalgia in science fiction is equally clearly an issue (although not new, as Meghan McCarron comments; personally I think someone should send Itzkoff a copy of Look at the Evidence [EDIT: or possibly some Delany]), and the Nebula Awards Showcases, or at least the ones I’ve read, tend to reek of it.