Reading List: Feenin: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music

There’s a lot of interesting material in here, with an admirable purpose. Taking as a starting point a history of posthumanism by N Katherine Hayles, Alexander Weheliye sets out to address what he identifies as a lack of attention to racial construction and formation, by arguing that contemporary R&B is “a pivotal space for the coarticulation of black subjectivity and information technologies”. Or, as he also puts it, “to realign the hegemony of visual media in academic considerations of virtuality by shifting emphasis to the aural”. There’s nothing like a good hegemony-realignment.

As in virtually all the other articles I’ve been reading, there are some eyebrow-raising moments. For example:

Even when giving examples of paradigmatic posthumans, Hayles falls back on white masculinist constructions by citing the Six Million Dollar Man and Robocop […] It seems that one has to be always already “free from the will of others” (or think that one is) in order to mutate into the fusion of heterogeneous agents comprising the posthuman state of being.

The first part is surely a fair criticism; but suggesting that the creation of Robocop is an example of posthuman creation centered on being free from the will of others seems a bit odd. Similarly, at times Weheliye seemed to me to cross over the line from arguing that the use of information technology in contemporary R&B has a unique meaning to arguing that the use of information technology in contemporary R&B is unique. Given that much of his article explores the use of more-or-less mechanized voices, at times you start wondering how such use differs — in terms of constructing a virtual self — from, I don’t know, “Fitter Happier” (or “Karma Police”, or indeed quite a bit of Radiohead), or work by other not noticeably black American artists.

Still, there are probably less such eyebrow-raises than average, and in broad terms Weheliye is quite convincing. The first half of the article establishes that “human has had a very different meaning in black culture and politics than it has enjoyed in mainstream America”, having to do with the disqualification of blackness from the category of human for so long; and further establishes that this understanding of human is not well-integrated into posthuman theory (at least in 2002). The second half of the article has the more challenging task, in that it has to establish that “incorporating other informational media … counteracts the marginalization of race” in posthuman theory, and further that “sound technologies” are in this sense a meaningful informational media.

Whether or not you ultimately buy all this, I think, depends on whether you accept the construction of “posthuman” in the article. Weheliye is good on his contention that “black popular musical genres make their own virtuality central” by, for instance, foregrounding the role of producers, and employing the aforementioned voice-alteration effects. (He also manages to write about popular music without sounding like he’s trying too hard.) “Feenin” is brought in as a term for a sort of industrial mechanisation of desire, the implication being this is a central affect of contemporary R&B, which also seems like a solid point.

Here’s the conclusion, though:

Eshun provides a singular account of nonhumanist black popular music as it explosively interferes with sound technologies, but in doing so he fails to take in the ramifications of these discourses in genres that do not explicitly announce themselves as Afrofuturist, such as R&B. Hayles’s conclusions seem indicative of numerous studies of virtuality and/or cyberspace, where race is heard in a minor key, and computer-mediated communication is the sole melody of the song we know all too well: the virtual. I hope I have shown that any theory of posthumanism would benefit from making race central to its trajectory, not ancillary, as well as venturing beyond purely visual notions of subjectivity.

As in Colin Milburn’s article, I find myself struggling with this understanding of “posthuman” — a word whose meaning is largely taken for granted in both pieces. Specifically: in what way is it meaningful to consider the sort of audio virtuality discussed in Weheliye’s article as evidence of posthumanity?

Consulting Wikipedia, I see that there is more than one definition of posthuman in use, which clears things up somewhat. The first definition given is that “the posthuman is a speculative being that represents or seeks to enact a re-writing of what is generally conceived of as human”. That’s the understanding in this essay, with the “general conception” of human being specifically identified as the Enlightenment conception from which black people were excluded: the use of virtuality in contemporary R&B challenges this conception, and therefore is posthuman. My reservation, then, is that what Weheliye is outlining is itself a virtual re-writing: it has no transformative effect on the experience of an actual human in the way that becoming Robocop does, or being uploaded into cyberspace does. Perhaps that’s not necessary for the academic/theoretical understanding of posthumanism under discussion here; but this is part of the reading list for a class on science fiction criticism, and within science fiction such an understanding of posthumanism strikes me as pretty marginal.

Reading List: Machineries of Joy

Subtitled “I Have Seen the Future and It Is Squiggly”, and available for you to read online here. This is rather fun; a self-consciously “outsider” take on “a form of music created at the end of the 20th century by Northern Europeans”, which scrupulously locates said music’s characteristics in the local environment and culture:

The geography and climate in Northern Europe (see Fig. 2) has historically necessitated the development of unusual personal mental stamina and perseverance — qualities evolved no doubt in order to survive the harsh months in the isolated villages and hamlets in that region. The long and dark winters favored a people who could look inward for months at a time and not go crazy. It would also favor intense social cooperation — rules and sets of elaborate prescribed behaviors — all designed to maintain the delicate social balance during those long difficult months. In addition, the inhabitants became accustomed to a monotonous diet and sporadic social contact. Naturally, all of this led to the evolution of a rather extreme but focused frame of mind.

Rather brilliantly, this is kept up right to the very last line of the piece, and even then all that is allowed is that it may be taken as “semiserious”, so that you’re forced to consider which bits of it you do take seriously. The actual argument of the piece is that a subgenre of electronic music labelled “blip hop” is “meant to be perceived as humorous and ironic”, and that its “imitation of machine processes and languages” are meant not to be taken at face value. To this end, three supposed characteristics of blip hop are offered: attraction to non-natural sounds, preponderance of “herky-jerky” rhythms, and an attraction to “structures and effects only possible through the use of the computer”.

Encountering this as an sf reader, it reads like nothing so much as a send-up of an introduction to the sort of territory-defining anthology so beloved in the genre: think of the Kessel/Kelly slipstream, post-cyberpunk and “secret history of sf” books, plus the two volumes of Interfictions and the VanderMeer steampunk and new weird books. So it’s somehow not a huge surprise to discover that it appeared first as the liner notes to “The Only Blip Hop Record You Will Ever Need, Vol 1“; both album and text being orchestrated by David Byrne, about whom I really know very little other than that he was in Talking Heads. Although blip hop exists in the urban dictionary, most of the google hits for the term feed back to the album in one way or another (complete with the sorts of reviews that those sorts of sf anthologies tend to receive, debating what exactly blip hop is and why it’s not what the work under review says it is), so I’m left none the wiser as to whether it’s something Byrne created out of whole cloth, or simply promoted. And I’m not actually unhappy about that.

Reading List: Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering

Oof. Much like “Train Tracks”, this strikes me as an article that carries on for far longer than its insight warrants, and that in the process “develops” its arguments to some quite impressively dumb conclusions.

The first part of “Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science Fiction as Science” [pdf], which provides an overview of what nanotechnology is and how it presents itself to the world, is good, usefully highlighting how inflated the rhetoric of the field can be:

Scientific journal articles reporting experimental achievements in nanotech, or reviewing the field, frequently speak of the technical advances still required for “the full potential of nanotechnology to be realized”, of steps needed towards fulfilling the “dream of creating useful machines the size of a virus”, of efforts that, if they “pan out … could help researchers make everything from tiny pumps that release lifesaving drugs when needed to futuristic materials that heal themselves when damaged”. These texts – representative of the genre of popular and professional writing about nanotech that I will call “nanowriting” – incorporate individual experiments and accomplishments in nanoscience into a teleological narrative of “the evolution of nanotechnology”, a progressivist account of a scientific field in which the climax, the “full potential”, the “dream” of a nanotechnology capable of transforming garbage into gourmet meals and sending invisible surgeons through the bloodstream, is envisioned as already inevitable.

The problems begin when Milburn starts to dig into the fact that “many critics have claimed that nanotechnology is less a science and more a science fiction”. To be clear, I don’t actually doubt that this is the case. But here’s how Milburn characterises the words of one such critic:

Gary Stix, staff writer for Scientific American and a persistent critic of nanotech … maintains that nanowriting, a “subgenre of science fiction”, damages the legitimacy of nanoscience in the public eye, and that “[d]istinguishing between what’s real and what’s not” is essential for nanotech’s prosperity.

Here’s what Stix actually wrote:

Less directly, Drexler’s work may actually draw people into science. His imaginings have inspired a rich vein of science-fiction literature [see “Shamans of Small,” by Graham P. Collins, on page 86]. As a subgenre of science fiction-rather than a literal prediction of the future-books about Drexlerian nanotechnology may serve the same function as Star Trek does in stimulating a teenager’s interest in space, a passion that sometimes leads to a career in aeronautics or astrophysics.

The thrust of Stix’s piece is indeed what Milburn says it is – an argument that the improbable rhetoric around nanotechnology obscures the reality of the field – but at this point, Stix is not asserting that nanowriting is a subgenre of science fiction, as Milburn suggests, but rather that when nanowriting filters into science fiction it may serve the same inspirational function as other sfnal transformations of real science. For an argument centrally concerned with the distinction between speculative fiction and speculative science, that seems quite important, and for an article that often turns on paraphrase or interpretation of key texts, a little worrying. Here’s how he summarizes the relationship:

Succinctly, science fiction assumes an element of transgression from contemporary scientific thought that in itself brings about the transformation of the world. It follows that nanowriting, in positing the world turned upside down by the future advent of fully functional nanomachines, thereby falls into the domain of science fiction.

No, it doesn’t. There is a clear relationship between the two things. There are depictions of nanotechnology in science fiction, and science-fictional claims by nanotechnologists. But these two things are not the same, not in source or form or intent or effect. At the very least, if you’re going to argue otherwise, you have to show that they are the same by comparing examples of each, and while Milburn dissects several articles about nanotechnology at no point does he perform a similar dissection on a science-fiction text. (Although it’s noticeable that he doesn’t tackle actual nanotechnology research articles, but rather general commentary on the field and its potential, which for the most part is held to stand for the whole; when he does mention “celebrated experimental results”, they are presented “in no particular order”, rather than the logical, chronological order, which rather demonstrates Milburn’s lack of interest in the non-fictional side of nanotechnology.) Absent such analysis, no amount of assertion or appeal to Baudrillard will make nanotechnology “simultaneously a science and a science fiction”, such that “only a more sutured concept – something like ‘science (fiction)’ – adequately represents the technoscape”. (At this point my print-out of the article has “Oh, come on!” written in the margin.)

This is not to say the article is without good bits, although at times it’s hard to shake the feeling that Milburn is just on a mission to add “nano” to as many words as possible — nanotech, nanomachine, nanowriting, nanorhetoric, nanofuture, nanoscientists, nanological, nanosystems, nanofanciful, nanonarratives, and so forth. The analysis of the rhetorics of nanotechnology is interesting, such as the observation that so many of the “dreams” it promotes are drawn from golden age sf. There’s an intriguing, if not nearly as definitive as Milburn seems to think, suggestion that Richard Feynman’s 1959 talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, owes a debt to Heinlein’s 1942 story “Waldo”, and an exploration of the ways in which Feynman’s talk is a much woollier affair than it is often presented as. And there’s a useful presentation and critique of the strategies nanotechnology advocates use to distinguish between their theorising and science fiction.

But much of the article is undermined by that failure to distinguish between the presentation of nanotechnology and the practice, or indeed just between informed and uninformed speculation. Here is the issue in microcosm, perhaps: Milburn writes that “despite many determined critics, nanotech managed to secure its professional future by combining fantastic speculation with concerted attacks on science fiction”, completely missing the point that the attacks are on claims that nanotechnology is sf, not on sf as a thing in itself. This leads to Milburn arguing for equivalence between a golden age sf story that imagines an application that could be achieved through nanotechnology – miniature surgery, for instance – and a contemporary nanotechnological speculation, and further that this equivalence “destabilizes” the division between theoretical science and science fiction. I would suggest that the relationship between the fiction and the science in the two cases is different, and that the division remains clear.

The final section of the article, having established to its satisfaction that nanotechnology is science fiction, takes a bit of a left turn into discussion of what our inevitable nanotechnological future will look like, summed up as follows:

As these scenarios suggest, nanotechnology has unprecedented effects on the way we are able to conceptualize our bodies, our biologies, our subjectivities, our technologies, and the world we share with other organisms. Whether positing the liberation of human potential or the total annihilation of organic life on this planet, nanologic demands that we think outside the realms of the human and humanism. Nanologic makes our bodies cyborg and redefines our material experiences, redraws our conceptual borders, and reimagines our future.

Stirring stuff! Although you start to wonder at that present tense, given that Milburn seemed to be arguing that nanotechnology remains science fiction, i.e. not yet real. And then you hit:

Accordingly, even before the full potential of a working nanotechnology has been realized, we have already become posthuman.

Oh dear. There’s not really any way to walk that back, is there? Unless … yes, I’ve got it! This article, which draws on science fictional imagery and techniques in its distortion of reality, is itself science fiction! I’m a genius.

(Some days, postmodernism makes me feel very tired.)

Reading List: Train Tracks: How the Railroad Rerouted Our Ears

Well, so much for schedules. I’ve been getting through the reading OK, but writing time has been scarce. Today the catch-up begins, and first up is Michael Jarrett’s 2001 article “Train Tracks: How the Railroad Rerouted Our Ears”. He proudly notes that it’s an expansion of an article that first appeared in the Tower Records in-house magazine Pulse, and that it is thus “a hybrid form of writing — a theoretically informed feature or popularized theory”, and while it’s true that it’s fairly digestible, I’m afraid bits like this —

Rather than speak of what I already know about railroads, I plan to interrogate, in this case, the sound of railroads as a possible site of my own sonic knowledge. Or to adapt a phrase coined by music critic Kodwo Eshun, I want to listen to the levels of science that inhere in railroads (1999, p. 70). What do trains already know about me, about my biases and prejudices regarding sound? How do I hear because of trains? Or more generally, How did trains train or even create modern ears? People, get ready; here are a few speculations.

— remind me of nothing so much as the proverbial Dad dancing at a disco. It also has nothing explicitly to do with sf, although Jarrett does frame his description of the perceptual shift introduced by trains as that most familiar sfnal operation, “literaliz[ing] the railroad-as-musical-instrument metaphor”. It’s easy enough to brainstorm a list of significant fantastic works that feature literal trains, and you might speculate as to whether the presence of the train shapes reader or character behaviour in the ways Jarrett talks about here. Mind you, whether such works have anything in common beyond that motif is another question: China Mieville’s Iron Council, Lucius Shepard’s “Over Yonder”, Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road, Geoff Ryman’s 253, Patrick Tilley’s Amtrak Wars books and One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance, are a pretty diverse bunch.

There’s also a slight overlap with Lysloff’s article; when Jarrett notes that “The railway brought noise — the sound of machinery — into rural and wilderness environments”, and that “What counts as music is all a matter of framing”, there are echoes of Lysloff’s concern with “natural” and “artificial” sounds. And if Jarrett was only making the small claim that “The railroad’s noise — its surfeit of stimuli — demanded that traveler’s adapt new modes of perception”, there wouldn’t be much to argue with in his article; it’s a rather obvious point that new types of experience promote new types of engagement. Where he falls down a bit is in trying to extend that argument. Without trains, he asks,

Would we have rock ‘n roll? Not likely, answers Albert Murray in his novel Train Whistle Guitar. His protagonist bluesman, Luzana Cholly, played guitar like “an engineer telling tall tales on a train whistle, his left hand doing most of the talking including the laughing and signifying as well as the moaning and crying and even the whining, while his right hand thumped the wheels going somewhere” (1974, p.8).

For starters, offering a novel as an answer to a sociohistorical question in this way is a pretty dodgy move, but more importantly, it’s not even a good start to an answer: the fact that one novel compares a guitar player to a train engineer in no way indicates an essential connection between train engineers and guitar players. He goes on to cite Houston Baker writing, in 1984, that “The dominant blues syntagm in America is an instrumental imitation of train-wheels-over-track-junctures“, which is a bit more useful, but a lengthier quote from Baker in which he ruminates that “Only a trained voice can sing the blues” seems almost parodic. (Jarrett’s comment that “groove is a way to declare that, while human beings always possessed the body part, asses were built by the railroad” surely is parody, but by that point I couldn’t really tell.)

There are useful, or at least interesting, or at least entertaining, observations scattered throughout the piece, and some of them do engage in the sort of riffing I’m digging at above; but the best bits of the article are the less flighty:

A number of scholars have explored how the railway prompted or, at least, reinforced distinctly modern ways of seeing (Schivelbusch, 1977; Stilgoe, 1983; Kirby, 1997). In brief, they note that all 19th-century railroad passengers, accustomed to pre-industrial modes of transportation, seemed to agree on one matter: “travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity” (Schivelbusch, 1977, p. 58). Put even more analytically, the velocity that atomized and automated objects — making them dart or roll past train windows — mechanized and diminished perception. […]

The visual challenge of high velocity rail travel prompted a choice, actually two possible methods of coping with the new technology. Passengers could develop modes of perception adequate to the new form of transportation, or finding prolonged window-gazing exhausting, they could direction their attention inward.

Again, however, at least to my mind, Jarrett undermines his piece by making larger claims than his evidence warrants:

Upon the ears of its passengers, trains imposed new ways of hearing analogous to panoramic perception. In place of the focused, engaged listening espoused by partisans of the symphony and institutionalized by concert halls, the railroad’s incessant refrain prompted “deconcentration” or “dispersal of attention” (Schivelbusch, 1977, p. 69). Ears conditioned by the sound of trains are neither attentive nor inattentive. […] Encased in a womb of steel, a sonorous envelope, the chronically distracted rail passenger bathes in patterned noise: adrift, blissed-out, “enraptured with the inescapable” (1941, p. 27). This is, in fact, the mood habitually summoned by electronic ambient and dance musics.

That there is a line to be drawn between immersion in a technological environment and electronic music of various kinds I have no problem with; as Jarrett notes, there is a comparison to be made between listening to music for structure or texture/timbre. That trains are, as Jarrett seems to suggest at times, at one end of this line, rather than a point on it, seems rather more tenuous. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that the mill or factory worker whose ears were conditioned by their environment were not, in a comparable way, chronically distracted, that the railroad was truly the first instantiation of “the technological sublime” shaping music.

Reading List: “Science Fiction and This Moment”

For someone used to spending most of their time reviewing, dealing with specific texts, rather than thinking about sf in general, there’s a small shock to be gained from the abstractness of the thought in the opening chapter of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Some words are impressed on the brain by their repetition: technoscience, critical, utopian, play, which define Csicsery-Ronay Jr’s angle of attack. I note this sentence, from the section justifying the book’s subject as being worthy of study:

Since the late 1960s, when it became the chosen vehicle for both technocratic and critical utopian writing, sf has experienced a steady growth in popularity, critical interest and theoretical sophistication. (4)

And a parallel one slightly later, from the section about the giants on whose shoulders Csicsery-Ronay stands:

Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Peter Fitting, Marc Angenot, and Carl Freedman, among others have established a major body of Marxist sf criticism connecting sf with ideology-critique and utopian theory. (9)

He goes on to list other notables in other traditions of sf criticism (postmodern, feminist, queer, structuralist, and so on), but it’s surely significant that this one comes first. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, of course.

I don’t want to say too much about the Beauties themselves, because hopefully I’ll get to post about each of them in turn, and the brief summaries of them here are necessarily partial, even with, or because of, the gloss that these are “beauties of a mind incapable of making itself up” (8). But in case I don’t, it’s worth saying that my first impression of them, at least, is that they make up an extended phenotype for sf that I recognise. The least convincing is “The Technologiade”, Csicsery-Ronay’s attempt to describe narrative shapes that sf stories take, because sf wriggles around too much to be so pinned. The others are all hard to argue with as vital characteristics of sf: neology and novums are straightforward; the description of sf as a “future-oriented” genre that creates “micromyths of historical process” (6) rings true; the suggestion that science is always transformed by sf for “cultural myth and aesthetic play” (6) is worth thinking about (and comparing and contrasting with Eric Van’s proposed taxonomy of science in sf); and if the technologic sublime is obvious, the technologic grotesque (sensahorror, if you will) is its insufficiently discussed counterpoint.

What this chapter covers, though, is the foundation on which this approach to sf is all built: an argument about the way the world is today, specifically that “the world has grown into sf” (1). This is the familiar argument that stuff that used to be sf has become the stuff of everyday life. (For another riff on this, see here.) In turn — as a response — this has lead, Csicsery-Ronay argues, to the mainstreaming of sf entertainment; and “This widespread normalization of what is essentially a style of estrangement and dislocation has stimulated the development of science-fictional habits of mind” (2) as when Csicsery-Ronay suggests that sf is culture’s “primary source” of neology, and that its use of novums engages our awareness of novums in the real world. These habits of mind are a way of dealing with unexpected technologically-related intrusions into our “normal” lives; or, in the book’s terms:

So it is that, encountering problems issuing from the social implications of science, and viewing dramatic technohistorical scenes in real life, we displace them into a virtual imaginary space, an alternate present or future that we can reflect on, where we can test our delight, anxiety or grief, or simply play, without having to renounce our momentary sense of identity, social place, and the world. (5)

This process is driven, the argument goes, by two “linked forms of hesitation”, the distance between what is conceivable and what is possible, and the distance between what is possible and what is moral.

The questions here, I guess, are: is this an accurate description of how we react to certain aspects of life; are those aspects of life distinct to the present historical moment as compared to other historical moments; and is science fiction an expression of this behaviour and a vehicle that encourages it? (I don’t think it can be one and not the other.) My answers are yes (but it would have to be, since I am indelibly shaped by umpteen years of reading sf); don’t know; and “I’m willing to buy that for the sake of argument”.

How much hangs on that “don’t know”? Not too much, I think. If what Csicsery-Ronay is arguing about our moment is accurate (and I think it’s certainly one way of looking at the situation, although he does threaten to head off into a dead end when he starts talking about how the advent of information culture has replaced existing standards with “an as yet inchoate worldview of artificial immanence” [4]), for the macro-scale success or failure of his book it’s not hugely important whether or not it’s generalisable or unique.

That is to say, here —

In this book, I shall approach sf on the one hand as a product of the convergence of socio-historical forces that has led to the current global hegemony of technoscience, and consequently as an institution of ideological expression; on the other, as a ludic framework, a wide-ranging culture of game and play in which that hegemony is entertained, absorbed, and resisted. (10)

— I’m more interested in the latter than the former; the understanding of sf as “a wide ranging culture of game and play” does not seem to me to be dependent on a particular socio-historical understanding.

The chapter ends with a couple of notes on method, or, if you like, laments for what could not be included. Csicsery-Ronay repeats that “a study of science-fictionality should not restrict itself to one medium only”, but notes that his bias in this book is for the literary form; and, a little more frustratingly, he notes that he has gathered “the usual suspects” in terms of “texts, styles, artists and themes”. This choice, he argues, is to avoid obscurity, that it’s better to test new arguments on works people are familiar with, and there’s something to that, even if it reinforces existing imbalances. But at the same time, he raises a tantalizing prospect:

Other national traditions of scientific fantasy have existed parallel to the Anglo-Saxon mainline, and they should be included in an overview of the genre, not as evolutionary exceptions or atavisms, but as legitimate cultural expressions and, indeed, as possible alternate lines along which the genre may develop in the future. However, that must wait for another book. (11)

I’d buy it.

(I realise I’ve failed to reply to comments on several posts, by the way; I’m hoping to get to them over the weekend.)

Reading List: Mozart in Mirrorshades

After a slight schedule adjustment, I’m onto the first of the articles: “Mozart in Mirrorshades: Ethnomusicology, Technology, and the Politics of Representation”, by Rene TA Lysloff.

The first thing to say is that the Sterling/Shiner story is used as a frame, not the article’s central concern. How it’s used is interesting, though:

To summarize the story, Mozart’s life is radically and irrevocably altered with the arrival of rapacious time-traveling technocrats (ostensibly from America’s near future).

The actual viewpoint followed by the story is that of one of the said rapacious time-traveling technocrats, Rice. Mozart is arguably the protagonist — he’s ultimately revealed to be the driver of the story’s climactic events — but it’s surely significant that he’s in the background of the tale, particularly since what Lysloff is primarily concerned with is not the position of the exploited culture, not the Mozarts, but the position of those who exploit, the ethnomusicologists and musicians, the Rices.

To summarize: Lysloff presents an argument for the need for ethnomusicology to take account of technoculture (a word I have a feeling I’ll be encountering a lot over the next few weeks): “social groups and behaviours characterized by creative strategies of technological adaptation, avoidance, subversion or resistance”. Much hay is made out of the use of recording technology, and in particular “the implicit and often contested notions of authenticity and authority related to such technology”; Lysloff is equally critical of “romanticized” attempts to capture authentic versions of “native” (his scare quotes) music by including the whole soundscape, and of the use of samples of such music, either self-consciously or unselfconsciously, that reduces the originators to “unknowing collaborators in an Orientalistic narrative of cultural exoticism”. He insists:

The pleasure of listening to recordings like these is not in cultural advocacy, despite the rhetoric of the Deep Forest project; nor is it to provide the listener with a kind of “authentic” aesthetic experience, as with many New Age music compositions employing world musics and/or natural sounds. Instead, the pleasure of such techno ambient music lies in the technological artifice itself — in “natural” sounds (and music) being made “un-natural” through sequencing in the context of synthesized rhythms and sounds.

It cannot, apparently, be either/or. The suggested resolution is, it seems, sufficiently advanced sampling technology — it’s impressive how much more normalised some of the language in the article has become since it was published in 1997 — which enables the creation of “audio simulacra”.

What the article doesn’t really address, to my mind (although it does feint in this direction early on), is the presumed distinction between “natural” and “artificial” music. I suppose the concept of an audio simulacrum is in part a suggestion that the artificial has become natural, within our technoculture (see, I’m getting the hang of this), but Lysloff doesn’t ever pay much attention to the obvious counter, that the whole distinction is bogus to start with, that all musical instruments are technologies. Of course, this may be the danger in reading one article that is outside my field of interest: it may be that this point is so obvious that it’s assumed before the debate is begun. But I didn’t feel that Lysloff was arguing for the translation of music between two technocultures so much as its importation from outside into a technoculture.

What has all this to do with science fiction? Certainly sf writers are influenced by music, as in the case of, say, Ian McDonald, who sought out Indian and Brazilian music as research for River of Gods and Brasyl, respectively (although wrote the climactic sequence in the former, if I remember rightly, with Godspeed You! Black Emperor on a loop); or as in the case of Tricia Sullivan, who responded to the question about influences in the survey (in part) by noting that she thinks she thinks more like a musician, and draws inspiration and ideas out of music. And those influences are filtered through a technologically-structured perspective. Lysloff suggests the following “lessons” for ethnomusicologists from the Sterling/Shiner story, if Mozart is seen as a trickster figure (he notes he could equally be seen as tragic):

(1) That “native” is not necessarily a naive and passive recipient of media technology; (2) that media technology may be especially empowering for those people with little or no political or economic power; (3) that people may use media technology in radically new and surprising ways, and infuse it with meanings specific to such use; and (4) the social meanings associated with particular technologies often change as these technologies traverse cultural boundaries.

You could, I’d suggest, strike out every instance of the word “media” in that paragraph, and re-read it as a list of issues sf writers should bear in mind.

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

The big critical work on the Masterclass reading list, this. ~~so as you can see from that schedule I’m taking it chapter by chapter; the aim not to review it so much as to annotate it with my thoughts.~~ Per the comments, I’m going to post about the first and last sections, and get through as much of the rest as possible. But first: as the book itself has a preface, so I give you a prefatory post.

(1) What the book does and does not attempt, as set out in its preface: “The main purpose of this book is to inspire better ones, not to have the last word” may be fairly standard boilerplate, but we also get:

“My greatest challenge has been to design arguments that will account for both refined artistic examples of sf and the popular commodity forms of “sci-fi”.”
“My goal is to understand science fictionality as a way of thinking about the world, made concrete in many different media and styles, rather than as a particular market niche or genre category”

We also get this: “My ‘beauties’ … are perhaps cognitive attractions, intellectual gravitational fields that draw our attention. They are perhaps mental schemes, through which we organize our thinking. They are perhaps tools for thought, so well made that we admire their design at the very moment we are using them.” And I’ll try to take them in that spirit.

(2) The table of contents:

Preface
Science Fiction and This Moment
First Beauty: Fictive Neology
Second Beauty: Fictive Novums
Third Beauty: Future History
Fourth Beauty: Imaginary Science
Fifth Beauty: The Science-Fictional Sublime
Sixth Beauty: The Science-Fictional Grotesque
Seventh Beauty: The Technologiade
Concluding Unscientific Postscript: The Singularity and Beyond

I should also note, perhaps, that if you want to play along at home it looks like you can read a decent chunk of the book via Google Books. And there’s what looks like a very early version of some of the thinking that went into the book in this SFS article, from 1996.

(3) Resources. Or, mostly, reviews.

Review by Adam Roberts at Strange Horizons
Review by Paul Kincaid at SF Site
Review by Farah Mendlesohn
Review by Eugene Thacker at Leonardo Online
Interview with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr by Matt Cheney, at Rain Taxi

(Roger Luckhurst also has a review in SFS, but that won’t be online for another seven months or so. Curses!)

Endings

Paul Kincaid’s review of Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth, at Strange Horizons yesterday, reminds me that I never did get around to posting about it, and that what I wanted to say about it chimes with some other half-thoughts I’ve been having about other recent reads, specifically about endings. For obvious reasons, we don’t talk about endings much; I’m going to try to get around the reasons here by sticking to talk about kinds of endings. Cold Earth first. It’s presented as letters home by the members of an archaeological dig in Greenland, written partly as diary or catharsis, and mostly because they lose contact with the rest of the world, but the last news they heard is that a new virus appears to be developing into a pandemic. Paul reads the book as being about the end of the world, as an exercise in the inevitability of the end of the world, which leads him to feel somewhat frustrated by the final chapter, and even uncertain about the apparent escape it offers: is it real? If so, it seems somewhat consolatory, or avoidant. Is it a dream? If so, it seems a betrayal of the book’s principles. For me, however, Cold Earth isn’t about inevitability so much as it it’s about exactly that uncertainty: is the world ending, or not? Are the characters being haunted, or not? Will they die, or live? In the baldest possible terms: what sort of story is being told here? And so for me, the closing chapter is a clever sort of imperfect cadence; it offers us resolution as a challenge to what we might have wanted, and (if we have decided what story is being told before we got there) what we expected.

Scarlett Thomas’ new book, Our Tragic Universe, plays a similar game more self-consciously. Its protagonist is a young author struggling to write a “real” novel, and meantimes making ends meet (just about) by writing genre fiction and reviewing weird and wonderful non-fiction books for a national newspaper. The first book she’s reading for review in the novel is a sort of new-age take on the Omega Point, the idea that we are probably living in a simulation of the universe at the end of time, which argues that this makes all sorts of things possible. Aha, we think, particularly (and, I am sure, deliberately) if we have read The End of Mr Y, which featured another book that purported to explain the nature of reality and was proved correct, and we sit back and wait for the fantastic to intrude into the story. But Thomas plays with us all the way through, not so much refusing to indulge us as refusing to tell us whether we have been indulged, whether or not certain improbabilities that dot the narrative are magical (or science fictional) in origin. (I have the impression that Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City plays a similar game: has anyone read it?) I have to admit, I admire the bloody-mindedness of Our Tragic Universe, its ability to pre-empty my every response and its refusal to confirm or deny anything, even as I find what I take to be the book’s ultimate argument – that art is a tool to enable us to resist narratives that get imposed on life – to be delivered with just a touch too much satisfaction. But even there I am anticipated, with one character claiming that what gives a story coherence is that it has an argument, or stakes out a position about the world, and that it doesn’t matter so much whether that position is true.

Dexter Palmer’s The Dream of Perpetual Motion, which I’m trying to write a proper review of for elsewhere, seems to me to similarly be about seeking a way to say something authentic in a world where story has been commodified and worn-out (this would be opposed to Elizbeth Hand’s take, that it’s “an elegy for … the passing of the power of the word, written and spoken”, in that ultimately I think it asserts the word’s continued power). Interestingly, compared to Our Tragic Universe, it never holds out any mystery about its ending. We know from the start where the narrator is (in a zeppelin that may or may not be powered by a perpetual motion, flying above a retro-futuristic metropolis), and in broad terms why he has ended up there. The book then records the narrator’s life story, and how it has been shaped by others. This means there are two key differences to Thomas – one, an explicitly fantastic setting, and two, a clearer focus on the process of finding a voice, finding a way to resist narrative – and I think those differences are why the book works better for me. Or, perhaps, not works better – since I think Our Tragic Universe achieves what it sets out to do, in terms of conflating the impulse towards story and the impulse towards the fnatastic – but why I prefer it. Palmer’s novel is no less self-conscious a work, nor any less playful (for certain, somewhat arch values of playful), but it feels perhaps less hesitant, more committed to its argument about the world. Of course, hesitance may also be a part of Thomas’ argument.

And last but not least there’s Patrick Ness’s Monsters of Men, the conclusion of the trilogy started by The Knife of Never Letting Go and continued in The Ask & The Answer. This is a very different book to the other three in some ways, being a headlong narrative that isn’t in the least concerned with its existence as narrative, building towards an ending that we are not necessarily supposed to anticipate in the way that, I’d suggest, we’re asked to anticipate the other three. On the other hand, like every other story it is a narrative that creates expectations and, like Cold Earth – if not to an even greater degree, since there are many more questions to be answered – the process of resolving those expectations is a mixed blessing. Part of me looks at the ending and feels disappointment, feels that it’s more conventional than I might have hoped for from Ness; another part of me looks at it from another angle (having read the three books above) and wonders whether it’s not the simple fact that it is an ending that disappoints. Part of the pleasure of Chaos Walking – a large part, actually – is the suspension of the various narrative possibilities, Ness’ expert manipulation of what the reader knows, and thus what they might expect, which engenders the sense that the outcome is particularly fluid, that many different things could happen. After the last page of Monsters of Men those possibilities have resolved into concrete things that have happened, and I’m not sure there’s any configuration that would have been wholly satisfying. More than that, even, I’m not sure that a wholly satisfying configuration of this type of story is even desirable: even being satisfyingly unconventional is a convention: perhaps there is a boldness in the mix of conventional and unconventional that Ness offers. Alternatively, perhaps I’ve just reached the point where I’ll never enjoy an ending naively again.

BSFA Book Club: Winter Song by Colin Harvey

Earlier in the year, Angry Robot very kindly sent a copy of Winter Song to all members of the BSFA. Ah ha, I thought, this represents an opportunity. (I’m not Niall, by the way; I’m Martin Lewis, the new reviews editor for Vector.)

I imagine most people reading this like to talk about books and talking is best when it is a conversation, as was proved by the success of last year’s Torque Control short story club. However, one of the things most reviewers like to see (but rarely get) is engagement with their reviews. The problem is that there are a lot of books out there which means that – unless a book has a real buzz about it – it is unlikely that a lot of people will be reading a particular novel at the same time. Regardless of how you feel about the Harry Potter series, there was something quite exciting about the sheer density of debate every time the latest book came out.

So I thought I would try and take advantage of the unusual situation of a large group of SF fans all having the same book at the same time to try and recreate that sort of debate.

Winter Song is Colin Harvey’s fifth novel – his sixth, Damage Time is out at the end of the month – and Angry Robot have given it an uncompromising tagline: “Rock-hard SF adventure. No one here gets out alive.” They further suggested you file it under [Starship Crash / Abandoned Colonists / Alien Slaughter / Hell Planet] hammering home the impression that this is going to be a very grim story. So what did the reviewers think?

Mark Chitty at Walker Of Worlds:

Winter Song is another title in the strong list Angry Robot Books has released since it’s inception earlier this year. The new imprint has had good reviews for its titles and when I saw this one coming up for an October release I was very interested – any sci-fi set in a future where humanity has expanded across the galaxy is something I want to hear more about. Winter Song was not quite what I expected, but it delivered an entertaining read in an unforgiving environment. Following Karl Allman as he crash lands on a forgotten and primitive colony world where the terraforming looks like it’s going backwards, Winter Song is a novel that has more than a few surprises up its sleeve. I was expecting to walk into this with a more typical human vs alien world theme where there were many strange and wonderful creatures. What I got was a story focused on human characters that developed and grew with each situation they face.

Jared at Pornokitsch

Although Winter Song still isn’t the cutting-edge science fiction that the imprint promises, it is a genuinely solid effort that made my morning commute a lot shorter. Literature, it ain’t – but Winter Song combines good storytelling and strong (but not overwhelming) world-building to make for an entertaining read. It doesn’t push any boundaries – if anything, this is a throwback to the Ace or DAW era. But that’s no bad thing… For a small paperback, this is a book with some big topics. Between the front and the back covers, Karl stumbles across a second tribe of lost colonists, conducts a detailed exploration of space-Viking culture, gets mauled by a wild bestiary of alien critters, hikes across a frozen wilderness and saves the world from magnetic mangling. Makes for a long day. And, in the breaks, Karl explains the rest of the universe to his Girl Friday.

Anthony G Williams on the BSFA Forum:

The first three-quarters of the story is unremittingly grim as Allman first struggles to resolve his inner conflict while working with the settlers and then tracks across a bleak wilderness, at risk from wild animals and trolls and pursued by a posse led by an angry head man. Although the SF background is always there, this part of the story has more of the flavour of a fantasy. The pace and mood change when he arrives at the beacon and discovers what it is, and the tale then becomes a tense SF drama with a spectacular, if open-ended, conclusion. The story is well-enough written, and the complex relationships between Allman, Loki and the settlers sufficiently intriguing, to carry me through a grimness which could otherwise have become tiresome.

James Maxey at Intergalactic Medicine Show:

First, let me get my big gripe out of my system. Winter Song by Colin Harvey has one of the least inviting opening chapters to a novel that I’ve ever encountered… It’s a very busy chapter, tossing out a lot of information about the ship, about Karl’s biological and technological enhancements that make his survival likely, and a brief data dump on the solar system he’s in and the planet he’s going to try to reach. The one thing it utterly lacks is anything more than a hint of who Karl is or any reason anyone should care that any of this is happening to him. I was pretty much ready to give up and move on to the next novel in my stack, but I happened to read on a few pages into the second chapter, and, lo, I was interested… On the whole, a fun read, if you make it past the clunky first chapter.

Shivari on Amazon:

I felt that the early stages where Karl is struggling with psychosis simply weren’t very convincing. It was all rather simplistic, mostly repetitions of references to Oedipus; the sex & mothering theme was a bit too obvious and heavy-handed. I started to get rather irritated by it, and was very happy when Karl reached some kind of stability. The book then presents with another issue of identity, before turning into a rather cliched space-opera. I think it was basically a good idea, but I don’t think that the author quite had the skill to pull it off. He wanted to pack too much in, perhaps?

Keith Harvey at Red Rook Review:

In conclusion, I was duly impressed with Winter Song. The prose is direct, strong, and serviceable; the characters are clearly drawn, the world of Isheimur completely realized, and the narrative convincing and satisfying. Ultimately, I was struck by the complexity of the novel. Its complexity, however, does not arise from the plot; it is rather simple. Instead, it is the magnitude of detail that supports the world-building. Harvey has succeeded in creating a fascinating planet with a unique environment, exotic fauna and flora, a medieval culture with its social constructs, traditions, and structures, and three humanoid species, not to mention several off-world cultures.

Now it’s over to you. If you aren’t a BSFA member but have read the novel please come and join in. If you aren’t a BSFA member, haven’t read it but want to get an idea about the book, Angry Robot have made a series of extracts available on blogs like Grasping For The Wind.

Review of 2009

While I was away this week, BSFA members should have received the latest mailing, including Vector 262:

That Was The Year That Was — guest editorial by Ian Whates
The BSFA Award Shortlists 2009
The Vector Reviewers’ Poll — edited by Kari Sperring
2009 in Film — by Colin Odell and Mitch LeBlanc
Progressive Scan: Genre TV in 2009 — by Abigail Nussbaum
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Kari Sperring
Foundation’s Favourites — Andy Sawyer
Resonances 58 — Stephen Baxter
The New X: 2010 — Graham Sleight

Ian’s editorial covers the printer-related challenges (read: woes) the BSFA faced last year and, as you may be able to gather from (a) the fact that Vector contains the BSFA Award shortlists but not winners and (b) the fact that the mailing also contains a booklet featuring the nominated short fiction, those aren’t over yet. We’re working on it, though.

In the meantime, however: the previous mailing, you may recall, included a copy of Colin Harvey’s novel Winter Song:

Winter Song cover

As mentioned in Vector, Martin Lewis will be running a discussion of this book here, next week — so if you haven’t cracked it open yet, you have this weekend to do so!