Category: uncategorized

Planning and Polling

Right then. We have talked about women writers and science fiction in Britain (and talked, and talked: I’m pretty sure it’s now the longest comment thread we’ve ever had here). The conversation isn’t over – although extensive, it was a pretty small group of people involved, after all; and let’s be honest, it’s been a more man-heavy group than is ideal. But the situation is pretty clear. Opportunities for women writing science fiction novels in this country are limited, and have become more limited over the course of the last decade; and it seems likely this has to do with an increasingly restricted, male-oriented definition of what is publishable as science fiction. Many of the causes are undoubtedly systemic, but it behooves us to resist them so far as is possible.

This must be – already is, for many – an ongoing project, but it will necessarily be composed of individual actions. My individual action is that I’m going to go and read some of the books on that list of 2010 UK releases by women that we put together, and post reviews here in the first week of December – that is, Monday 6th to Friday 10th. Perhaps it’ll give you some things to put on your holiday wishlist, or some ideas for presents for others.

Here’s the first audience participation bit: I invite you all to join me. This shouldn’t be a hardship: the danger in talking about how little science fiction by women is published in the UK is that we forget how good some of it is. But the more people join in, the more books get talked about, and the clearer their importance to the field becomes. We’ve been talking about science fiction published in the UK, so that’s where I’d like to focus; but I’ll link to any reviews of sf by women posted during that week, if you tell me about them.

The second audience participation bit is this. Several times during last week’s discussion, issues of canon formation and the field’s memory came up, and how these work against women writers: the Gollancz all-male “Future Classics” promotion was mentioned as both symptom and cause of the current situation in the UK. So I think we should put together a corrective, an additional list of Future Classics by women.

I therefore invite you all to email me your top ten sf novels by women from the last ten years (2001–2010), before 23.59 on Sunday 5 December. Again, science fiction, although I leave it up to your conscience to decide which, if any, books that excludes. And for this, I think, the books can have been published anywhere. I’ll collate all the votes, and announce an overall top ten in the same week as I post my reviews (and highlight which books haven’t been published in the UK). To get you started, here are the decade’s nominees for the Clarke, BSFA, Hugo, Nebula, and Tiptree awards; Locus Online also has a directory of published books going back to 2002. And hey, if over the next few weeks you want to blog about your favourites – or send me a paragraph to post here – don’t let me stop you.

I have a few other ideas, but they’re half-formed — I’d like to see what additional data can be gathered, for instance. In the meantime, feel free to add your suggestions, and please spread the word. There’s a lot we can’t fix, but we can at least show that the books that are published are welcomed, and appreciated!

No Boom Today?

I’m breaking this topic out from yesterday’s thread because it’s something of a tangent. Paul Kincaid said:

I have a distinct if unquantifiable sense that sf in Britain has become more male-oriented over the last few years (since, if you like, the end of the so-called British renaissance). I have no idea why this should be.

I asked whether he’d be willing to put a date on that ending. Martin Lewis suggested:

2000? Publication of Look To Windward in which Banks symbolically loops back to Consider Phlebas. Also publication of Revelation Space which marks the rise of Alastair Reynolds and the new generation of British male space opera writers.

To which I have just replied:

Not sure about that. Andrew Butler’s article on the boom [pdf] wasn’t published until 2003, and refers to it as contemporaneous: “It is asserted that there is currently a boom within British science fiction — by editors, by critics, by authors, by readers, in the pages of Science Fiction Studies and in the publicity for some events at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London in May 2003. Let us assume that this is not a mass delusion, and there is indeed a boom.” He also includes Reynolds in his census of boomers, which I think is right; to me it feels as though the period, say, 98-03 is when the boom really got traction. I might even pick Interaction as its peak moment, with that all-Brit shortlist for the Best Novel Hugo. I suppose you could say that’s also when it ended, but to be honest, until Paul’s comment I thought of it as a continuing phenomenon.

Your thoughts? It now occurs to me that Paul may have simply meant to suggest that the shift he detected in itself could be taken as a marker of the end of the boom/renaissance, although I’m not sure that holds up. Surely the central marker of a boom has to be the visibility and success of the thing that is booming, and I don’t think there’s been a change for British sf on either front — or if there has, it’s been upwards, given the recent Hugo successes of messrs Gaiman, Stross and Mieville. And Doctor Who.

Let’s Talk About Love

The other day, when Victoria Hoyle was dismantling the introduction to Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternate History, I mentioned Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste as a possible palate-cleanser. I came across Wilson’s book myself via Matt Cheney, whose discussion of the book now makes life easy for me:

The concept of the book is seductive: Wilson, a Canadian music critic and avowed Céline-hater, spends a year trying to figure out why she is so popular and what his hatred of her says about himself. I kept away from the book for a little while because I thought it couldn’t possibly live up to its premise, and that in all likelihood it was more stunt than analysis. […]

By focusing on Céline Dion, Wilson is able to discuss a wide range of topics: the details of Dion’s career, of course, but also the history of popular music, the globalization of certain styles and tastes, the power of local cultures, the role of class and aspiration in forming and policing personal taste, the demonization of sentimentality and excess, the promotion of irony and transgression, etc. Wilson also provides a good, basic overview of histories and traditions of aesthetic philosophy, showing that even the most eminent thinkers and critics tend to do little more than construct elaborate sleight-of-hand routines. Because his goal is not to debunk so much as it is to explore, Wilson is able to use the best of what he encounters — most fruitfully in his clear-eyed application of ideas from Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Taste is not, for Wilson, merely an expression of social influences and aspirations, but it is partly so, and those parts are often what is most invisible to us when we discuss our aesthetic judgments.

There’s a lot packed into a short book (164pp), in other words, and it’s well worth the time of anyone who’s even tangentially interested in any of the points listed above. In particular, as Matt says, the final chapter is almost infinitely quotable. He pulls out a couple of chunks relating to Wilson’s vision of a more pluralistic construction of taste; what caught my eye, more self-centredly, were the paragraphs linking that vision to the day-to-day work of the critic:

What would criticism be like if it were not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great? If it werne’t about making cases for or against things? It wouldn’t need to adopt the kind of “objective” (or self-consciously hip) tone that conceals the identity and social location of the author, the better to win you over. It might be more frank about the two-sidedness of aesthetic encounter, and offer something more like a tour of aesthetic experience, a travelogue, a memoir. More and more critics, in fact, are incorporating personal narrative into their work. Perhaps this is the benefit of the explosion of cultural judgment on the Internet, where millions of thumbs turn up and down daily: by rendering their traditional job of arbitration obsolete, it frees critics to find other ways of contemplating music. (156)

[…]

You can’t go on suspending judgement forever — that would be to forgo genuinely enjoying music, since you can’t enjoy what you can’t like. But a more pluralistic criticism might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment, with all its messiness and private soul tremors — to show what it is like for me to like it, and invite you to compare. This kind of exchange takes place sometimes between citics on the Internet, and it would be fascinating to have more dialogic criticism: here is my story, what is yours? (157)

I like advocacy; I like people being for and against works of art, and I’m in favour of discourse that encourages freedom of opinions. (Rather than saying: if you don’t like Heinlein, you’re not a real science fiction fan.) But that is, in part, because I think advocacy can and should be decoupled from the sort of “objective” voice Wilson criticises, and that couching something as a personal “tour of aesthetic experience” can be a powerful form of advocacy. I think this can work whether you’re for or against something, but it seems to me that it might help with the oft-noted reviewerly problem that it’s easy to say why a book is bad and hard to say why a book is good, if instead you’re trying to say why a book was good for you; it gives you a way to think specifically about a general question. After all, the sources of delight in fiction are surely as individual as readers.

Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

BSFA members should be receiving the latest issue of Vector this week:

Torque Control — editorial
No Easy Choices: Some Thoughts of an Adult Reading Children’s and Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy by Andrew M. Butler
Writing a Ruritania in a Post-Colonialist World by Farah Mendlesohn
Taking Control of the World: Kristin Cashore interviewed by Nic Clarke
Nicholas Fisk: Ten Short Novels by Niall Harrison
First Impressions — book reviewed edited by Martin Lewis
Resonances 59 by Stephen Baxter
Foundation’s Favourites: Catseye by Andre Norton by Andy Sawyer
Progressive Scan: The Sarah Jane Adventures by Abigail Nussbaum

The smashing cover photo is by Tom Ryan. This is Martin’s first issue as Reviews Editor, and he’s instituted a few changes — not least of which is his opening column, which you can read here.

As ever, we welcome letters of comment, or feedback on the forum.

Also of note: you can listen to Jonathan McCalmont’s interview of Lauren Beukes (from last week’s BSFA meeting) on the BSFA website, here.

The Prosperous Time

I wonder if this explains why there’s been a small bump in traffic for this post?

So opens an early scene from The Prosperous Time: China 2013, a hotly controversial Chinese science-fiction novel. Written by 58-year-old Hong Kong novelist Chen Guanzhong, who has lived and worked in Beijing for much of his life, China 2013 presents an ambivalent vision of China’s near future: outwardly triumphant (a Chinese company has even bought out Starbucks), and yet tightly controlled. There is a mood of mounting tension, here evident as a woman with dissenting thoughts is followed by secret police.
[…]
The significance — and uniqueness — of the novel is that it is a work of social science fiction, a subgenre that has become virtually nonexistent since the establishment of the People’s Republic.
[…]
… epitomized by Lao She’s controversial 1932 novel, Cat Country. Lao She, one of the most important Chinese writers of the last century, published his only science-fiction novel as serial installments in a magazine. The story is set on Mars. Although it was published 13 years before Orwell’s Animal Farm, the political satire functions in similar fashion, with intrigues among a colony of cats on Mars serving as criticism of contemporary political reality in China. It was the only Chinese sci-fi novel then translated into foreign languages.

Let’s hope China 2013 follows in Cat Country‘s footsteps, and appears over here before too long.

EDIT: Next year, apparently!

I Assume This Will Be In The Next Ansible

The Booker longlist has been announced:

There are no first novels – which have become a feature at longlist stage in the last few years, and there is no genre fiction. Motion said they had not consciously set out to exclude genre but stressed that the Man Booker prize was an award for literary fiction and there were plenty of prizes for crime and sci-fi.

You know, I mostly agree with Martin these days that it’s largely unnecessary, and looks petty, to complain too strongly about this sort of thing; but every so often an example comes along whose stupidity is so beautiful, so elegant, that I can’t help myself. Even leaving aside the “crime and sci-fi are not literary” implication: you didn’t consciously set out to exclude books of type x, it’s just that you decided the Booker isn’t a prize for books of type x? Impressive!

Reading it Right

An interesting post by Gord Sellar, about reading Adam Roberts’ On:

I was always so puzzled about my response to Roberts’ work. After all: I wanted good characterization. I wanted lovely, stylish prose. I wanted some intellectual challenges, and some philosophical dilemmas to wrestle with. Roberts had all of these things in spades. How come I always emerged from his novels finding myself so very frustrated, or at the least so very uneasy?

Well, a good part of it — not all of it, but a good part of it — has to do with the insistences and expectations I was bringing to his work. It was, in large part, because of how I was reading him.
[…]
On reading Puchalsky’s review [of Splinter], I was reminded of how compelling a storyteller I’ve always found Roberts despite the things I haven’t liked about his books — of his wonderful style and distinct imagination — and so I decided to pick up On, and then while reading it simply to step out of the way and let Roberts tell me the story he wanted to tell, with the nuances he wanted to polish and shine.

This is, of course, easier said than done, possibly for Adam Roberts more than many writers; I’m reminded of Farah Mendlesohn’s comments in her book about Diana Wynne Jones to the effect that the first generation of Jones-readers had to learn how to read those books, how to get the most out of them, because they weren’t quite like other books that were being published. Sellar’s post makes me want to revisit On, which I didn’t much like at the time, to see whether my perception that Roberts has improved over the past decade is accurate, or whether I’ve just got better at approaching his work in a useful way. More generally, the ability to approach a text openly (or, as Alvaro mentioned the other day, recognising when you’re not) is such a desireable skill, I think, both in terms of critical technique and simply in terms of reading pleasure. This is not to suggest that all books are good if you approach them from the right perspective; what I mean is, there’s pleasure in recognising and appreciating how many different ways there are to do fiction.

Reading List: Dead Channel Surfing

Another article, unfortunately, that makes heavier weather of its argument than is really necessary. Karen Collins sets out to convince us of, as her subtitle has it, “the commonalities between cyberpunk literature and industrial music.” Except, straight away —

Although cyberpunk began as a literary movement, it is often referred to as more than that — it is, rather, a concept reflected in many disciplines sharing a similarity of approaches and attitudes.

— and the argument she goes on to construct depends rather heavily on the inclusion of films, from the obvious (Blade Runner, The Matrix) to the slightly less so (The Terminator). Which is fine in principle, obviously; it’s just not what the title promises. There are other carelessnesses. In an initial list of characteristics associated with cyberpunk, Collins eyebrow-raisingly includes “technophilia”; but later in the article comes round to the more sensible “Cyberpunk, therefore, has an arguably ambiguous relationship to technology”. Mondo 2000 is described as “the original cyberpunk fanzine”, and Cheap Truth isn’t mentioned. Etc etc.

Some of the points made are actually more general than they need to be, to the point of banality. In describing shared influences on cyberpunk and industrial — focusing on “Dada, William S Burroughs and the punk movement” — Collins ends up pointing out that “Cyberpunk fiction similarly incorporates many references to popular culture”, and perhaps even better in terms of failing to establish a unique relationship, that both forms are “rife with neologisms”. This is despite the fact that the shared influences seem undeniable, based on the numerous specific examples from both cyberpunks and industrial artists that Collins is able to provide.

The section on “recurrent dystopian themes” is a bit more wobbly, I think, in part because Collins starts with this list of “themes fundamental to dystopia”:

Although these themes are not necessarily in every dystopia, at least one will always be present. The primary themes of a dystopia can be summarised as; the socio-economic system of the West will lead to an apocalypse. The apocalypse will lead to, or be caused by, a totalitarian elite controlling the masses through technology, which brings about a need for a resistance, usually led by an outsider-hero.

Personally, I’d have thought canonical cyberpunk texts fit this schema somewhat less well than the mainstream of dystopias — although they do fit, sure, particularly if you allow, as Collins does, that “in cyberpunk, the apocalypse is often a metaphoric one”. Collins also has less evidence on the industrial side, here, able to establish the anti-capitalist bona fides of the genre pretty easily, but not doing so well on the other points.

More interesting is the discussion of “unconventional sound-making devices” — that is, bits of discarded technology — used in industrial music, although a consideration of the use of robot voices seems like a sidetrack; it makes for an interesting contrast with the version of HipHop described in “Feenin“, but robots don’t seem to me a core concern of cyberpunk.

Lastly, and most entertainingly, Collins identifies a similar mood of “anguish, darkness and the future”, on the basis of lists of keywords, although it’s not clear whether the cyberpunk list is based on a spectrum of reader responses, or just the one guy:

Cavallaro links cyberpunk and gothic horror with a series of keyword similarities relating to the moods evoked by the narratives: decay, decomposition, disorder, helplessness, horror, irresolution, madness, paranoia, persecution, secrecy, unease and terror. [8] Similarly, my study of connotations of industrial music, using free-inductive methods of listener response tests on a selection of industrial recordings, found that the most common responses were sad, dark, anxious, futuristic, death, urban, violent, and anguish.

That footnote, incidentally: “Cyberpunk and industrial could also be argued to sometimes have an underlying humour that helps to lighten this mood.” Which, yes, that’s probably a good thing. And although Collins never quite says this explicitly, although each of these correspondences on its own is rather loose, all of them together do make the case that “these artists are branches on the same tree” fairly convincing.

Reading List: Bridging the Gaps: Science Fiction and Nanotechnology

Right, forget about the other article on sf and nanotechnology, and just read this one instead. It is a really good, solid piece of work. Its claims are precise, modest, well-argued and interesting. It does end up with some fairly jargon-heavy sentences — “The synchronic dimension of the chronotope is traversed by a diachronic or historical vector” — but by the time you hit them, Lopez has explained all the terms; and he only introduces specialised words that he actually needs.

His argument is a more limited, specific but clearly consequential version of that advanced in the Milburn piece: that the discourse about nanotech (or what he calls NST, “nanoscience and technology”) makes use of narrative techniques characteristic of science fiction in a way that damagingly restricts discussion of the field. Crucially, he notes that he is not questioning the credentials of nanotech researchers, nor the status of the field as a whole; and also that the strategies he is discussing are not specific to nanotech. He develops his argument through close reading of two texts — one from the margins of the field, one from its centre.

Briefly, Lopez suggests that writing about nanotech characteristically makes use of two of the strategies sf uses to construct a world, namely the intrusion of a novum, and the development of a future history. The “chronotope” mentioned above is the “literary space-time” constructed by a speculative narrative; and the chronotope of writing about nanotech is a reframing of the history of technology as having “the attempt to manipulate atoms, initially clumsily but increasingly with more precision” as its central issue. The novum in his first example, Drexler’s Engines of Creation, is the development of a molecular assembler; he explores how Drexler’s text creates a history that treats this development as inevitable, and then extrapolates from it. In his second example, a report from a 2001 American conference sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce, the novum is, slightly more subtly, “the integration and synergy of the four technologies (nano-bio-info-cogno) [that] originate from the nanoscale”. One of the successes of the article is its illustration that, actually, the rhetoric in this report — which predicts, for instance, that intelligent machines will eradicate possibility, and that nanotech will enable direct brain-to-brain communication that will allow a “more efficient social structure for reaching human goals” — is not significantly less heated than Drexler’s. The difference, perhaps, is that Drexler writes of a device-novum intruding into the real world, while the report describes a theoretical-understanding-novum intruding into the scientific world, so its predictions are less foregrounded.

This approach to writing about nanotech is problematic:

SF literature typically incorporates a historical account, or future history, that explains how the fictional world has come about. It normally contains the period before, during, and after the novum. If the narrated world is to be credible, the relationship between the three periods must be one of inevitability. This sense of historical necessity is also reproduced, as I have shown above, when the novum structures NST discourse. […] if the inevitability of these processes are accepted, then there is logically and discursively a rather limited role for ethical reflection or analysis of social implications.
[…]
The extrapolative structure of the novum erases the contingencies inherent in technoscientific development by projecting it along a linear developmental path that will most certainly be frustrated. […] This becomes particularly problematic when these developmental paths are invested, as they are within a technological determinist logic made possible by the novum, with the ability to resolve all manner of social, cultural, and political problems. Potential non-technological solutions become marginalized and are not pursued.

Essentially, writing about nanotech that treats it as a novum and models its likely effects on the world by its very nature simplifies and flattens the world: or, put another way, the world is not a single-novum story. Lopez then takes time out in his conclusion to emphasise that “the existence of SF narrative elements in NST discourse does not make the latter a work of literary SF”, and that actually because it is literary speculation — because it is imaginative play — “ironically, literary SF succeeds where NST discourse fails”. Sf can, Lopez argues, use a single-novum distortion to comment on precisely the ethical and cultural problems that nanotech writing attempts to obscure, because “whereas in SF the extrapolated future is a stepping-stone for critical reflection, in NST discourse the extrapolated future is the endpoint of the reflection”.

Ironically, it’s only in this defense of science fiction that Lopez manages to make me want to argue with him, and perhaps even then argue is too strong a term. I’d suggest, though, that one of the most significant trends in the sf of the last couple of decades is that single-novum works have fallen out of fashion, in part because, just as Lopez says of nanotech writing, they often seem to simplify and deform the world. (John Clute’s critique of some of Adam Roberts’ novels, for instance, takes this sort of line.) Instead, paradigmatically in the novels of Ian McDonald, we get (and encourage) futures where many novums collide, which purport to be more “realistic” extrapolations from the world as it is; or we get the William Gibsons of the world telling us that this is precisely why sf has become impossible, that all we have is the spinning of the given moment’s scenarios.

One last interesting point: Lopez suggests that one flaw in nanotech writing is that “totalizing utopian vision … invites similarly generated counter-visions”: that is, you can get a dystopia from the same novum, following the same logic, but changing some of the assumptions going into the model; and in so doing, you can open up a discourse space for the sort of ethical-cultural questions that the conventional nanotech narrative blocks. This makes me think of extrapolation to peak oil, or ecotastrophe, or some other catastrophic point, as a solution to Gibson’s bind: take those single novums far enough, and you clear a space to start doing sf again.