Category: uncategorized

Sigh

This is something of a sidebar from the ongoing discussion about The Thirteenth Child (and, at this point, the discussion about the discussion about The Thirteenth Child), but it’s one that I am bothered by, for what I am sure will be obvious reasons:

I read this book awhile back, because I was given an ARC of it by someone I’ll simply refer to as Prominent SF Magazine Editor; I was considering a gig as a reviewer for him. (I ended up deciding against this for brand management reasons — hard to honestly critique the novels of established authors when you’ve got a book coming out in the same genre yourself; there’s a conflict of interest/competition issue there, I think. Maybe when I’m established myself, I can do it? I don’t know.) But I had to call him and warn him: the review would not be positive. I read the novel with interest, but increasing frustration as the book’s problems became clear (I had no warning that this was an AU that erased Native Americans [and Latinos, though that’s fallout of the NA erasure]). The book has other problems besides this. By the end of the book I was angry, and since the Prominent SF Magazine had a policy of “mostly positive reviews”, that wasn’t going to happen.

We’ve been here before with regard to the insidiousness of “mostly positive” reviews, but this seemed worth pulling out as an example where the harm caused by the policy is more obvious than usual. It does a disservice both to readers who might have seen the review and now will not, and to the field of sf reviewing and criticism as a whole, for which full and honest discussion must be a priority; I hope, though I accept it is likely in vain, that Prominent SF Magazine Editor feels a mite embarrassed by their reviews policy today. That the writer in question has subsequently decided not to review at all, at this stage in their career, also makes me sad — it impoverishes the dialogue, in more ways than one — but it is understandable.

Review of 2008

The latest BSFA mailing should have been dropping through peoples’ doors this week, including Vector 259:

Torque Control — editorial
Letters — from Farah Mendlesohn, Bob Ardler, and Rich Horton
Vector Reviewers’ Poll — edited by Kari Sperring
You Sound Like You’re Having Fun Already: The SF Films of 2008 — by Colin Odell and Mitch LeBlanc
Progressive Scan: 2008 TV in Review — a column by Abigail Nussbaum
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Kari Sperring
Resonances — a column by Stephen Baxter
Foundations Favourites — a column by Andy Sawyer
The New X — a column by Graham Sleight
Celebrating 30 years of Luther Arkwright — Bryan Talbot interviewed by James Bacon

Enjoy, and send letters to the usual address; and, as ever, if your copy doesn’t arrive in a timely fashion, let us know. There is an updated website in the works, to be more fully incorporated with the main BSFA site; but if nothing else, I’ll put some content up on the old site next weekend.

Further thoughts on Dollhouse

Episode six of Dollhouse was widely hyped as the point where the show kicked up a gear, probably so that the fans would hang in there through the opening episodes, which ranged from mediocre to mediocre with a side helping of exploitation cake. And surprisingly, while it doesn’t live up to the hype, coupled with the episode before it does give me hope that there’s something more to the series than I initially thought.

The first four episodes were hampered by a mission of the week which never convinced me that there was any need for a doll, rather than a similarly skilled person who would do the job for a lot less money. I wouldn’t mind an unconvincing scenario so much if it was entertaining. Episode five, ‘True Believer’, was the first sign that there was the potential for something better, with a more convincing need for a doll and a less predictable plot, as well as more scenes with a fully-clothed Eliza Dushku, but it still fell some way short of greatness.

‘Man on the Street’ is another step up in quality. In Joel Myner’s hiring of a woman to pretend, if only for a day, that the woman he loved is still alive and well, we get a situation I can see that someone would hire a doll for, instead of the non-active with the same skills who could do the job for a lot less money and a lot less hassle. It’s even briefly sympathetic, until Ballard punctures it with the difference between his fantasies and Myner’s – however unhealthy his fantasies about Caroline/Echo are, he isn’t using an innocent to make them come true. And the final scene, where Echo returns to complete the assignment cut short by Ballard, nicely conflicts our sympathy towards Myner with the inherent skeeviness of the dollhouses, and guest star Patton Oswalt pulls off a tricky role which could easily have been unredeemably loathsome. (Even if it was distracting when I spent the first scene wondering why he was so damn familiar.)

It’s also the episode where Ballard gets to be more than the cliche of FBI agent chasing the case no one else believes in, even if I suspect some of it is unintentional. It’s clear that while he might be a good investigator, he’s also obsessive about this case, and not afraid to use violence against anyone who he sees as standing in his way, although I think that what I’m supposed to take away from the fight scenes is how enjoyably badass he is, not how much he enjoys a fight. This being a Joss Whedon show, once he got to the happy post-coital scene with his neighbour it was inevitable that something horrible was about to befall her, and while the revelation of her secret active identity is not much of a revelation, I’d rather have that than have her end up dead, and it sets up the potentially interesting conflicts when Ballard realises what and who she is. And is an FBI agent really supposed to reveal the details of his cases to the woman next door, even if she does make him lasagne?

The third pairing, and probably the least satisfactory, is that of Sierra and her rape at the hands of her handler. Despite the red herring of Victor, her handler was so obviously dodgy that the identity of her abuser wasn’t a surprise, and it was deeply unsettling because of both the doll’s downtime personalities being so naive and childlike, and the speedy resolution of how Sierra would be just fine now he’s out of the way. My interest in this development is more for the character of Boyd – I want to see just how a character who feels so strongly about Sierra’s abuse that he punches a man through a plate glass window can reconcile that with working for the Dollhouse, which performs the same abuse on a wider scale, and how he fell so far from his presumably moral and upstanding past as an officer of the law.

The episode also delivers some hints about where the overall plot is heading, with the Dollhouse revealed to be an international organisation which does not necessarily exist just to provide the doll’s services. This makes sense not just because the Dollhouses themselves take some hiding, but because it gives them a purpose beyond the rather unconvincing mission of the week assignments. And there’s a mole in the Dollhouse, which I am hoping will be Topher, if only because I still find him to be creepy and arrogant and not at all funny.

Dollhouse stil has an uphill struggle to get past the problems inherent in the premise – it’s noteable that the best episode so far is one which keeps Echo and her assignment in the background for much of the episode. I still can’t see where it can go in the long-term, because the more they engage with the disturbing nature of the dollhouses, the less I want to watch them try and do a fun personality of the week episode. For now they’ve demonstrated enough potential to keep me watching.

When A Fantasy Is Not A Fantasy

Charles N Brown, March Locus:

Of the newest books, I loved The City & The City by China Mieville (Del Rey — June), a total departure from his earlier books. The language is much more spare, the story very tight, and the mystery involved very satisfying. There is no magic at all, and I would catalog it as an alternate world or Graustarkian fantasy since the only element that ties it to our field is the very strange central European country it’s set in.

Blurb:

Borlú must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other. It is a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen, a journey to Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma.

First review I’ve seen:

What makes this book fascinating is that the two cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma exist in the same space, sitting one atop the other, and residents of each city have been trained since birth not to notice the other for fear of ‘breach’, the movement or acknowledgement of the other city that is punishable by the folks known only as ‘Breach’ who investigate and severely punish transgressors. Functionally each city is different. They have different architecture, different currency, they work completely independently but they have to avoid collisions while driving in the same space and avoid noticing each other as they walk the same streets; it’s this setting that makes The City And The City such a compelling read.

The book itself:

“You know that area: is there any chance we’re looking at breach?”
There were seconds of silence.
“Doesn’t seem likely. That area’s mostly pretty total. And Pocost Village, that whole project, certainly is.”
“Some of GunterStrasz, though …”
“Yeah but. The closest crosshatching is hundreds of metres away. They couldn’t have …” (16)

“This morning I found a few of the locals I used to talk to,” Corwi said. “Asked if they’d heard anything.” She took us through a darkened place where the balance of crosshatch shifted and we were silent until the streetlamps around us became again taller and familiarly deco-angled. Under those lights — the street we were on visible in a perspective curve away from us — women stood by the walls selling sex. They watched our approach guardedly. “I didn’t have much luck,” Corwi said. (21)

I lived east and south a bit of the old town, the top-but-one flat in a six-storey towerlet on VulkovStrasz. It is a heavily crosshatched street — clutch by clutch of architecture broken by alterity, even in a few spots house by house. The local buildings are taller by a floor or three than the others, so Besz juts up semi-regularly and the roofscape is almost a machiocolation. (28)

I have to admit, so far I’m a bit sceptical: the metaphor is clear enough, but as framed at this point in the book, if it’s not fantastic in some way, then it seems too improbable to believe. (I’m also not entirely convinced that Inspector Borlu’s narrative voice can accomodate words like “alterity”, or elsewhere, “polysemic” and “effaced”, as casually as Mieville seems to want it to, but that’s a separate issue.)

… In with the new

This is what 2009 looks like so far:

… which is to say, these are the 2009 books I’m hoping to get stuck into over the next few months. (Feel free to tell me what I’ve missed.) There are a few books in there that are cheats: Graceling, The Hunger Games and Tender Morsels are 2009 books in the UK, but were first published in the US last year. I think Vandana Singh’s collection The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet is also technically a 2008 book, but I didn’t see a copy until January. Of the rest, I’m planning to review Marcher, Steal Across the Sky, Twisted Metal and Best Served Cold for Strange Horizons, in that order (perk of being a reviews editor: you get first pick). I’m perhaps most looking forward to Singh’s collection, and to In Great Waters, since I liked Whitfield’s first book and Nic tells me this new one is excellent. And the first one I’ll be reading, which you can expect a post about here (after Lavinia), is that spiral-bound book, which is a proof of Toby Litt’s Journey Into Space; I’m extra-intrigued now, because Ursula Le Guin didn’t like it, but Martin and Paul did.

Hunt the Centre

Jeffrey Ford:

Lord knows I’m not exactly an astute observer of the ebb and flow of the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, but I have been looking, if sometimes with glazed eyes, for more than ten years, and in recent months, maybe over the past year, it strikes me that the genre(s) are re-centering. The energy in publishing and I suppose a good deal of the writing and reviewing seems to be flowing back to classic forms and styles. I don’t take this as either positive or negative but merely an evolutionary development. I mean scientific evolution, devoid of the concept of perceived social “progress.” Just as environment shapes organic evolution, I suppose the current fiscal environment is responsible for a part of this. It just makes sense that publishers, in order to stay viable, have to bet on projects and books that they feel certain will have a chance of bringing in some income. The ready cash to take chances has dried up as it has in the greater economy. I see this in the themes of proposed anthologies, in the popularity of certain novels, etc. I’d like to be more specific, but I don’t really give a shit enough about the issue to do the leg work. It’s just a perception I figured I’d throw out there and see what others thought. I’m not of the mind that this says anything about the quality of the fiction being published. It strikes me that there are as many great writers around as there ever were, and many of the newer writers (this is anyone younger than me, and at this point that’s a lot of writers) generally amaze me with their abilities. There are still writers traveling the marchland at the boundaries as there always have been and always will be, but the general energy seems to be flowing again to the center. What do you think? Is this one of those instances where I’m finally getting what has been evident to pretty much everyone or in my own addled way am I on to something? Maybe even the idea that the energy of the genre(s) has ever been anywhere else has been an illusion or delusion. What say ye?

What I say is: how would you go about establishing whether or not this is the case? On the one hand, I guess, you could look at something like the SF Site “Reader’s Choice” lists, comparing, say, 2001 and 2002 with 2006 and 2007.The first two of those lists, which include Kelly Link, Maureen McHugh, China Mieville, Jeff VanderMeer, Carol Emshwiller, Kelley Eskridge, and M John Harrison, to my eyes do perhaps look less “centred”, than the latter two. On the other hand, Robin Hobb is there in both 2001 and 2006, and Steven Erikson is in all four lists. You could look at Hugo award shortlists, though I can’t discern any great differences there — and, of course, last year Michael Chabon won with a book that is, for all that it uses a classic form (several forms, even), arguably a boundary case. You could attempt to analyze a list of forthcoming books: I suppose you’d have to control for publisher as well as genre (and sub-genre).

The idea that something of the kind Ford suggests might be happening chimes with three things in my head, though. One is the discussion of “normal” and “revolutionary” sf that Gary Wolfe kicked off on the Locus blog; another is Jonathan McCalmont’s column about a new generation of British sf writers; and the third is the ongoing background concern about “entry-level” sf, or the lack thereof (which overlaps with the ongoing discussion about YA sf, I think). Which is to say, I think, that I’m as interested in what might be driving such a shift — readers or writers or publishers — as I am in the fact of it happening or not. Ford suggests it might be publisher-, and ultimately economy-driven; on the other hand, there are many more sf-focused blogs now than a few years ago, and most of them focus on core genre books, which may give a sense that that aspect of the conversation has got louder. My gut-level response is that, to the extent I see a degree of re-centring in my reading and in the spread of books I’m looking forward to, I see it in the output of genre publishers, but I also see, if anything, an increasing number of mainstream-published sf novels to look forward to: Xiaolu Guo’s UFO In Her Eyes, Toby Litt’s Journey Into Space, and Bernard Beckett’s Genesis, for instance, not to mention a new Margaret Atwood sf novel later this year. All of which is to lead up to an inevitable question: what do you think? We’re probably too close to the issue to really know one way or the other, but let’s speculate.

BBC Radio SF Season

All the sf your heart could desire, starting yesterday. Far more, in fact, than I would have thought any one person could listen to in two weeks. However, I will try to make time for these:

28 Feb 2009, 21:00
BBC Radio 3 — The Wire
Salmonella Man on Planet Porno
A group of male researchers, on a quest to discover the secret of the bizarre planet Porno, become sexual objects themselves.

[Based on the story, I assume]

1 Mar 2009, 15:00
BBC Radio 4 — Classic Serial
Rendezvous with Rama
An adaptation of the late Arthur C Clarke’s novel. In the 22nd century an enormous alien spaceship hovers over the earth.

2 Mar 2009, 10.45
BBC Radio 4 — Womans Hour Drama
The Death of Grass
All the grass in the world has been attacked by a deadly virus. The world’s staple foods are dying. The Custance family flee to a safe haven in the Lake District and descend into barbarism as they try to escape starvation and civil war.

[If only because I want to see how they manage this in fifteen minutes. Unless the idea is that it runs for the whole week.]

3 Mar 2009, 11:00
BBC Radio 7
Alpha
Drama about a computer so powerful, and so all-knowing that it may be said to have an independent life of its own – despite the fact that it is a man-made creation.

Alpha, won a Sony Radio Academy Award in 2001 for Best Drama.

4 Mar 2009, 11:00
BBC Radio 7
Omega
A sister play to Alpha, Omega takes us into a fascinating and disturbing vision of the near future, where the most human and endearing character we meet has, it transpires, no real existence at all.

5 Mar 2009, 14:15
BBC Radio 4 — Afternoon Play
The State of the Art
Dramatisation of an Iain M Banks story in which the Culture, a spacebound utopian civilisation, encounters Earth.

[As adapted by one P. Cornell.]

08 March 2009, 20:00
BBC Radio 3 — Drama on 3
Bring Me The Head of Philip K Dick
A darkly disturbing and surreal vision of contemporary America where faith, national security and the very fabric of time are under attack from an unlikely and terrifying weapon.

Invented by a shadowy research unit inside the Pentagon, the android head of Philip K. Dick is on the loose and wreaking havoc.

I do not feel the slightest inclination to make time for a “re-imagining” of Blake’s 7, however.

Today’s Free Book

Is The Heritage by Will Ashon, who reports that:

So, the good burghers of Faber & Faber have decided against publishing a mass-market paperback edition of “The Heritage”. I would’ve been pissed off, anyway, I guess, but I think would have understood this hard-headed business decision. After all, if you wanna kiss the ring of the Leather Pope then corporate capitalism’s where it’s at and fuck any of the considerations (art, literature, quality) you may pay lip service to. But I think my sense of fair play was piqued by being told less than two weeks before said paperback edition was supposed to be out. I mean, really, how shit is that? Sorry? Pardon? What was that I heard about putting authors first? Anyway, as the only way left to me to build any sort of a readership for what I think is a pretty good book (not a great book by any means, but not as bad as a lot of the shit out there), I’m posting it here for you to download. The file is only 853.5 KB and it downloads as a pdf direct from this link.

There are reviews here by Colin Greenland and here by Martin Lewis. I haven’t read it yet — indeed, I now feel slightly guilty for not having got to my dead-tree copy yet — but I liked Ashon’s first novel, Clear Water, and this sounds like it has similar virtues. So, as the man says, give it a go.

War in SF

Even all the snow ever can’t stop the new Vector getting through, it seems:

Torque Control — editorial
Letters — from Anna Feruglio Dal Dan and Martin Lewis
HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds as a controlling metaphor for the twentieth century — Stephen Baxter
The Menace of War: Einstein, Freud and SF by James Holden
After Heinlein: Politics in Scalzi’s Green Soldier Universe by Martin McGrath
The Flowers of War — Nick Hubble considers The Carhullan Army
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Kari Sperring
Transmission, Interrupted — a TV column by Saxon Bullock
Foundation Favourites: Memoirs of a Spacewoman — Andy Sawyer
Resonances: Hitler Wins — Stephen Baxter
The New X: Wings of Song — Graham Sleight

It’s a big issue — twelve pages more than usual! — but as noted in the editorial, I also recommend the following supplementary reading:

Wild Hearts in Uniform — Gwyneth Jones
Denvention 3 Guest of Honour Speech — Lois McMaster Bujold

Letters to the usual address; and, as ever, if your copy doesn’t arrive in a timely fashion, let us know. Otherwise, apologies for the quiet period around here — very busy with the day job at the moment, and I’m off to Montreal (for all of 48 hours!) tomorrow.