… come links. Apologies for the complete lack of other content, but this week is keeping me busy. With any luck I’ll get something more substantial posted at the weekend. In the meantime:

• Jed Hartman on the latest round of discussion about gender bias in sf
• Compare and contrast: Mark Chadbourn on golden ages of commercial genre publishing and Nicholas Whyte on Hugo-winning fantasies
• Neil Williamson on “This Happens” and the current incarnation of Interzone
• Reports from conversation: one, two, three, four, five and six
• Two from Eve’s Alexandria: Nic on Spin and Victoria on Cloud Atlas
• The Velcro City review of The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett
• Matt Cheney’s overview of recent short story collections and my gripe with the same
• EDIT: Alex on Lady in the Water, proving that he should blog more.

In the best tradition of contentless posts, I now expect to receive at least 39 comments.

(Why yes, the August F&SF did arrive here yesterday.)

1. I went to see Superman Returns earlier this week. On IMAX. Bits of it (the flashback, the plane crash, the rescue from the boat, and the ending) were in 3D. I enjoyed the spectacle of it, and it’s hard not to have at least some admiration for how transparently mechanical it is, how diligently it ticks the boxes associated with Superman. As summer movies go, it didn’t seem bad.

Lou Anders didn’t care for it much; on the other hand, one of the things he picks up on, the lack of nuance, is actually something I think Singer made a virtue out of. It is strange to see a hero so straightforwardly and comprehensively moral, and as Abigail Nussbaum notes it’s equally strange to see a modern screen version of this story that so thoroughly foregrounds Superman, as opposed to Clark Kent.

What I think both this choices have going for them is that they emphasise the alien-ness of Superman. To the point, in fact, where having seen Smallville, whatever the merits or the flaws of that show, it’s hard to imagine how the Superman of Superman Returns avoided being similarly humanised by his upbringing. It also puts an interesting spin on the Lois/Clark dynamic; personally, I’ve never quite been able to decide if I don’t understand what Clark sees in Lois, or whether I understand all too well, but it’s never been a relationship that quite sits comfortably with me, and this film, I think, plays up that ambivalence. Clark seems more of a disguise, more of an act than ever. At heart, Superman Returns could almost be seen as asking a question in response to Lois’ Pulitzer-winning article; not “Does The World Need Superman?” but “Does Superman Need The World?”

2. Jose of the extraordinarily energetic Meme Therapy asked me if I had anything to say about this question:

Science Fiction often presents a coded commentary on the present. What current work of science fiction do you think delivers the most relevant/poignant message with respect to our present geopolitical situation?

So a couple of thoughts.

One, define “our”. A book like Geoff Ryman’s Air, for instance, examines the consequences of the increasing connectedness of the world. It’s a brilliant and important novel, and certainly relevant, but it’s not about the “us” that are most likely to be reading this post in the sense that a series like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol is about us. (I’m trying to think of a recent and particularly British future here, and drawing a blank. How embarrassing.) It’s not just that the answer to the question depends on where you’re standing, but that I think mainstream sf is (finally) becoming aware of that fact.

Two, I’m interested in the time-sensitivity implied in the question. Accept as a given that all fiction is a response to the times in which it’s written, and that looking back at now from ten years in the future it is likely to be more obvious which books were prescient. The question is then really about what seems most relevant now, which implies fiction with a certain consciousness in its approach. This seems to me to take us either in the direction of deliberate allegory, or more interestingly towards something like Sterling-definition slipstream (works that make you feel very strange, the way living in the early twenty-first century makes you feel).

Here’s my suggestion: Hav by Jan Morris. It’s possibly the slowest fixup in history, being comprised of a short novel, “Last Letters From Hav”, published in 1985, and a long novella, “Hav of the Myrmidons”, published this year, plus an introduction to bind the two together. It’s fiction in the style of travel writing, and an exploration of a city that doesn’t exist, and how it changes over time. In its 1985 incarnation, Hav seems bowed down by the weight of history, of multiple colliding traditions; in its 2006 incarnation, it seems both febrile and somehow diminished. Ursula le Guin, reviewing it for The Guardian, argued that it’s science fiction, and concluded:

Morris says in the epilogue that if Hav is an allegory, she’s not sure what it is about. I don’t take it as an allegory at all. I read it as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the west and east in two recent eras, viewed by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us. Its enigmas are part of its accuracy. It is a very good guidebook, I think, to the early 21st century.

3. Strange Horizons reviews is having a Doctor Who week. Specifically, Iain Clark reviews “School Reunion“, Tim Phipps reviews Love and Monsters“, Abigail Nussbaum reviews the season two finale, and Graham Sleight provides an overview of the whole season. Speaking as someone who didn’t really watch Who growing up (or at least not sufficiently for it to have been a formative experience), it’s been interesting to see how differently seasons one and two of the new version have been received.

So we’re losing Emerald City (and, sadly, the blog), but we have gained a new ‘zine this week: Heliotrope, from the people behind Fantasy Book Spot. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, you can download a pdf of the whole first issue, or smaller pdfs of each individual article and story, but there’s no easy way to actually view the content online (i.e., no HTML version).

As you might expect for a first issue, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Heidi Kneale’s essay “Where’s the Sci-Fi: the relationship between trends in science fiction and modern history,” for instance, seems perfunctory, to put it kindly; Edward Morris’s story “On The Air” is an intermittently entertaining but clunky alternate history, largely cast in the form of an radio broadcast by Hugo Gernsback. (Others may like it more. It’s in a similar vein to “Imagine“, from Interzone last year, which I also wasn’t bowled over by, but which made the most recent BSFA Short Fiction Award shortlist.) But there are some good reviews by Victoria Hoyle, and an interesting poem by Catherynne M. Valente. (Which may sound like faint praise, but I’m a tough sell when it comes to poetry.)

There’s also “The Skeptical Fantasist: in defense of an oxymoron,” an essay by R. Scott Bakker which, from the title, I was hoping was going to be an antidote to Charles Stross’ odd assertion that “fantasy is, almost by definition, consolatory and escapist literature. Pure fantasy doesn’t really tell us anything about the world we live in”. (Further discussion, although mostly of the other bits of Stross’ post. And while we’re in the neighbourhood of the subject, see this discussion of what’s ‘cutting edge’ in sf.) And it is, in a way, once you get past the equally odd assertion that “Where science fiction, one might say, constructs pseudo-knowledge of the future, fantasy fiction reconstructs the pseudo-knowledge of the past” by realising that Bakker is talking almost exclusively about genre fantasy.

His argument, I think, is that (1) to go along with the general fall in scientific literacy, there has been an equally damaging but less recognised fall in “interpretive literacy”, the ability to recognise the fluidity of texts; and that (2) genre fantasies, typically based on anthropomorphic (“familial”) worldviews, look familiar and comforting to those who lack facility of interpretation, but can be used to “speak out, to use the frequency of shared interests to communicate different values, different perspectives, to people engaged in their own ingrown conversation.” Fair enough. But along the way, this argument almost gets lost in the noise of an entirely separate argument about the stagnation of the literary establishment. I’m also not entirely convinced that he understands molecular genetics enough to be drawing on it for similes:

Within the literary establishment itself, the consensus seems to be that the culture industry is largely to blame, that in the interests of reaping the efficiencies that follow from standardization, the media corporations have literally trained the capacity for critical interpretation out of consumers. […] No one, they might say, laments interpretive illiteracy more than they do, but so long as the system continues unchecked, there is precious little they can do.

Of course this story is an oversimplification. Nor is it the case that all the literati buy into even its most sophisticated versions. But nonetheless reproductions of this tale float around university literature departments like bits of messenger RNA, ready to undo any damage to the master code that not only determines the form and content of all things literary, but also secures the authority of those with the proper institutional credentials.

A shame. But the ‘zine is worth a look anyway, and it pays good rates, so long may it survive.

On an entirely different note: John Clute’s new website has a page of notes and things, including a collection of “aphorisms and thoughts, mostly swollen, out of which is it sometimes possible to say something”, of which my favourite is probably this:

Genres: Stud farms for McGuffins that lasted the course.

1. This essay by Benjamin Kunkel in the New York Times, about the rise of confessional memoirs, leads to this post at So Many Books, and this response at Tales From the Reading Room investigating what it is about contemporary life that makes us so pain-obsessed, suggesting that

Trauma is resolutely not about knowing things; it’s about having been through an event that was radically alien to knowledge and understanding. But turning it into a narrative gives it the look of having been mastered—there’s a powerful transformation at work in the victory of words over dangerous, untamed experience that we can all share and marvel at. Equally the experience of trauma is one of the few in our society that is given a special form of authority. No one can deny or argue with a trauma victim’s experiences, which is a pretty unique state of affairs in the modern world.

And see the comments, this followup, and this post at Eve’s Alexandria for more general discussion of creating personae through nonfiction. It’s a fascinating topic in and of itself, but something about it also chimes with the thinking I’ve been doing recently about that most ill-defined of literary categories, slipstream; certainly the Kessel/Kelly definition of slipstream can be understood as being about attempting to convert an incompletely understood experience, that of daily living in the twenty-first century, into a narrative. But it’s notable that more than a few of stories they selected for their anthology end with uncertainty or dissolution—quite the opposite of the sort of mastery of story being discussed above.

2. Waggish has an interesting post on left-brained literature, which (based on the list) you could also largely call “that stuff sf readers like that isn’t genre sf” (Murakami, Eco, Calvino, Borges etc). The determination of overlap between this category and slipstream is left as an exercise for the reader.

3. Abigail Nussbaum on Superman Returns, which I might be able to respond to if I’d had a chance to see the film yet.

4. An interesting review of A Scanner Darkly, and here are the first 20 minutes or so of the film (which is not out for another few weeks over here, and I’m getting impatient).

5. Clarkesworld books has started putting fiction online, starting with a few stories from Fantasy Magazine.

6. Martin Lewis on Polystom by Adam Roberts. To the list of useful references that are frustratingly not online, I would add Matt Moore’s review of Polystom from Foundation 91. One day, maybe …

7. Farah Mendlesohn’s SF reading habits questionnaire is closing down at the end of July; if you haven’t filled it in, now’s the time.

1. My excuse for not posting anything recently is that I’ve been on holiday in Japan. I had a great time; there are some photos (ok, a lot of photos) here. And I did get plenty of reading done while out there, so have several posts waiting in the back of my head to be written.

2. One thing I read was an interesting little book called The Situation and the Story: the Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick. This was an impulse-buy, largely because we’re working on an issue of Vector with the loose theme of ‘storying lives’, and the many ways that can be interpreted, and it does have things to say about fiction, but it’s primarily concerned with the creation of narrative in non-fiction.

Gornick argues that non-fiction writing has a story (the emotional experience recreated by reading it), a situation (the context in which the story is placed), and, crucially, is written not so much by a person as a persona: a particular slice of the author, around which the experience being examined is organised. I was already starting to think about this idea in relation to reviewing and blogging, and then I came back and read Cory Doctorow’s Locus column, “Science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the internet.” It’s another iteration of Doctorow’s argument that we live in a conversation-driven age, and I think he’s got a point. You only have to look at the nominees and winners of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer over the past few years, and you’ll see that writers with prominent blogs tend to do well. I’m not suggesting that people nominate or vote for authors purely because they know the name from a blog—I think, perhaps naively, that most people have enough integrity to resist that—but I do think that, if they like a writer’s blog, people are more likely to pick up books by that writer.

In itself, this is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, just a thing; if it becomes the norm, certainly some writers will be more suited to this type of reader relationship than others, but some writers are more suited to the current literary environment than others, too. But I’m not as sure as Doctorow that it will become the norm. For one thing, in Gornick’s terms, these aren’t so much reader/writer relationships as reader/persona relationships, and I think that may have limitations Doctorow may have underestimated—not least that there’s no particular reason why liking the persona’s non-fiction writing will translate to liking the writer’s fiction writing.

3. Finn Dempster reviews Transcendent by Stephen Baxter at The Mumpsimus. One of the projects I have in the back of my mind for when I have significantly more free time than I do at the moment is to re-read and write about the Destiny’s Children sequence (Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent), which I think might be the most coherent set of books Baxter has yet written. Transcendent, in particular, seems to me to be almost a sort of summing-up of Baxter’s writing to date. For one thing, it interweaves a lot of recurring themes, not just the series themes of evolution and religion; for another, it brings together near-future and far-future stories in a particularly elegant fashion, with each, in the end, redeeming the other. (Plus, “The girl from the future told me that the sky is full of dying worlds” has quickly become one of my favourite opening lines evar.)

4. Shameless self-promotion: while I was in Japan, Bookslut published my review of The King’s Last Song by Geoff Ryman. See also Abigail Nussbaum’s review, and the conversation we had about the book.

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.