An interesting review of James Wood’s new book, How Fiction Works. I think it accurately diagnoses most of Wood’s weaknesses (“Wood is at his best when either microscopically close to a text or expounding it from a magisterial distance. In the middle ground, where plots and contexts lurk, he sometimes gets things wrong”), but made me think in a new way about Wood’s style:

Wood became famous by taking reviewing very seriously, an attitude that — for a number of reasons, not all of them sinister — is less widespread than you might think. Intelligent, well-read and extremely confident, he wrote from the beginning in a style that suggested he’d put some thought into questions concerning verbal surfaces. By the time he was starting out, the witty changes of register associated with the New Review and the New Statesman in the 70s had degenerated into a reflexively jokey high style in the hands of many journalists. In academic criticism, on the other hand, the enthusiasm for theory that peaked in the 80s had often resulted in curdled writing and an avoidance of “value judgments”. Wood responded by fashioning a critical voice that’s serious but opinionated, heavily stylised but not slick. He shares Martin Amis’s taste for coining paradoxical metaphors, but not for the quasi-laddish diction with which the novelist once brought aesthetic judgments down to earth.

As a result, Wood’s writing sometimes seems to issue from a world of rather dandified beautiful letters. Unafraid of sounding like an connoisseur, he’s entirely comfortable, say, describing Pushkin’s stanzas as “little private carriages of plush”. Nor is he afraid of sounding faux-donnishly lofty. Yet few books would get reviewed if critics agreed to a total ban on elevated language. Wood thinks that some writers worry about stylistic excess in the same way that some actors worry that their job isn’t manly, and his style is in part a stand against that tradition.

We hear writers talking about the importance of voice frequently and at great length. We hear much less (grumbling about John Clute aside) about reviewers’ voices, but I think the truth is that how something is said about a book is almost as important as what is said. Let’s have reviews with a bit more conscious control of their personality, in other words. (Of course, by no means have I fully worked out what I want to sound like when I write a review.)

For many readers, Ballard is the author of the controversial novel Crash (1973), a surreal exploration of sexuality and the motor car. But before Crash, and before his wife’s death, Ballard’s novels had begun to shape a unique suburban dystopia. In its time, this vision was categorised as science fiction. Now we can see it more clearly as deeper, darker and more prophetic.

Riiight.

This rather handsome picture is a piece of original artwork by Vincent Chong. It’s going to be the cover of an 80,000-word anthology of original fiction, edited by Ian Whates, that the BSFA is publishing to mark its 50th anniversary. And here’s the table of contents:

Celebration, ed. Ian Whates

The BSFA – An Appreciation – Pat Cadigan
“The Jubilee Plot” – Stephen Baxter
“Wilson at Woking” – Ken MacLeod
“The Killing Fields” – Kim Lakin-Smith
“Having the Time of His Life” – Ian Watson
“The Dog Hypnotist” – Tricia Sullivan
“The Crack Angel” – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
“Keep Smiling with Great Minutes” – M. John Harrison
“Living with the Dead” – Molly Brown
“Next to Godliness” – Brian Stableford
“Mellowing Grey” – Dave Hutchinson
“At Shadow Cope” – Liz Williams
“Peculiar Bone, Unimaginable Key” – Brian Aldiss
“Deciduous Trees” – Martin Sketchley
“Soirée” – Alastair Reynolds
“On the Sighting of Other Islands” – Ian R. MacLeod
“Fireflies” – Christopher Priest
“The Man of the Strong Arm” – Adam Roberts
An Afterword – Ian Whates

So, see you at the launch event at Orbital?

• Julie Phillips has some new articles (well, some previously published in Dutch, but new in English) up on her website: an Michael Chabon and Daniel Mendlesohn (the “gates are infinitely wide and always open” interview came out of the same conversation), and reviews of sf by Lessing, Winterson and Ninni Holmqvist, The Dangerous Book for Boys, Manliness, and Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer.
• Two posts about sf at This Space worth disagreeing with: one, two. (See also Larry on why sf is not the literature of ideas.)
• An interesting review of The New Space Opera by Alan DeNiro; also at Rain Taxi, Kristin Livdahl reviews The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick.
• Dan Hartland likes Catherynne Valente, but isn’t keen on Hal Duncan.
• An interview with Ekaterina Sedia.
• Terrence Rafferty on horror by Joe Hill, Laird Barron, Clive Barker and John Shirley.
• Nic Clarke has 4,000 words of thoughts about John M Ford’s collection Heat of Fusion, split into two posts.
• Abigail Nussbaum’s examination of Deep Space Nine continues with a search for Ron Moore.
• Martin McGrath reviews Interzone 214.
• An interesting essay by James Wood! It’s about character: “I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or “deep” enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.”
• The BSFA short fiction nominee that wasn’t online before, Alastair Reynolds’ “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter”, now is. [Edit: Tony points out that only the start of Ken Macleod’s story is currently online.]
• Cover art for Ian R MacLeod’s Song of Time.
• The winners of the Aurealis Awards, with judges’ comments; Ben Peek critiques the latter here, and in so doing inspires me to look up the winning novel, The Company of the Dead, only to find it’s not even available for order on Amazon UK.
• And don’t forget that the deadline for applications to this year’s SFF Masterclass is later this week.

As noted by James, the BSFA forum went live this afternoon; go here. Some parts of the forum are read-only to non-BSFA members, but there are all-welcome parts as well. In one of them, I’ve attempted to start a discussion about Jo Walton’s report that she’s just had a tenth UK publisher reject her novel Farthing because seriously, what’s up with that?

Per my reading resolutions, I was hoping that quite a bit of my reading in 2008 will have some other date on the copyright page. Then I sat down and started making notes for this post. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, it seems.

January: Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo

Long-time readers will remember that I rather liked Guo’s previous, Orange-shortlisted novel, so this, when I saw it on the shelves in Borders, was an automatic purchase. Unlike A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Twenty Fragments is set entirely in China, being the story of a girl who moves from the country to Beijing to find a job in the film industry. It looks like Guo’s semi-autobiographical tendencies are still in force, then, but if Fenfang is anything like as engaging as Z, this should be a winner. (In other news, according to this profile, “her next book and film […] are about UFOs and aliens, loosely inspired by China’s place in the world.”)

February: Mushishi, volume 3, by Yui Urushibara

Or, at any rate, so claim Amazon. I hope they’re right, because Urushibara’s series is one of the two best comics I discovered last year (or more accurately, was introduced to by Micole, the other being Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim, which is its opposite in many ways). I keep trying to write something about the first two volumes and failing. I get as far as explaining that mushi are an entire kingdom of living beings half way between a sort of microorganism and a sort of spirit, that each volume collects five or six short stories about the travels of a mushi master (mushishi), that the setting is rural Japan, and that the artwork is beautifully textured — but then I don’t know how to capture the tone of the stories, the poignancy of them. Maybe I’ll have another go when I get my hands on volume three.

Also out in February: Paolo Bacigalupi’s debut collection, Pump Six and Other Stories (having read very nearly all of the intense science fiction stories that make up this book already, it seems likely that it’s going to be one of the best collections of the year; maybe reading them all together will reveal weaknesses not previously obvious, but I doubt it); Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago; a new Victor Pelevin novel, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf; Paul Melko’s interesting-looking debut, Singularity’s Ring; and Weaver, the conclusion of Stephen Baxter’s Time’s Tapestry sequence, which looks like it will actually tip over into full alternate history.

March: Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell

Godawful cover, but it’s a new novel by Mary Doria Russell! This one looks to be a posthumous fantasy set behind the scenes at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, but really that’s irrelevant, because it’s a new novel by Mary Doria Russell; it gets bought. Also in March, Swiftly by Adam Roberts (set in a world in which, after Gulliver returned from his travels, others went after him and enslaved the various races he found; the short story that makes up the first chapter of this novel is possibly my favourite of Roberts’ short fiction, so I have high hopes for the rest of the book) and, according to Locus at least, Ian R Macleod’s Song of Time, which “tells the story of this century through the eyes of a great musician as she unravels the mysteries of her past, and contemplates making the ultimate leap into life beyond the body.” I have my doubts as to whether it will actually show up in March, since PS novels have a habit of appearing a bit later than advertised, but I have my fingers crossed.

April: Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn

This is the book which elaborates on the taxonomy of fantasy that Farah Mendlesohn started using a few years ago (portal fantasy/immersive fantasy/intrusive fantasy/liminal fantasy); it should be a book to get one’s teeth into. I’m looking forward to it not least because I understand it actually engages with examples from contemporary fantasy, in all its diversity. Also this month: Jonathan Strahan’s YA anthology The Starry Rift (complete with gorgeous cover, and Kelly Link sf story); a UK edition of a new Michael Marshall Smith novel, The Servants (I read a couple of the Michael Marshall thrillers, but never found them as satisfying as the MMS books); House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, which sounds as though it will be epic in scope even by Reynolds’ standards; and a new Philip Pullman novella set in the world of His Dark Materials, Once Upon a Time in the North.

May: Incandescence by Greg Egan

’nuff said.

June: Flood by Stephen Baxter

Isn’t that a good cover? This looks, on the face of it, like Baxter does global warming, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be an update of The Kraken Wakes (given that the Amazon description begins “Next year. Sea levels begin to rise. The change is far more rapid than any climate change predictions; metres a year”, which sounds like external intervention to me). Either way, I’m ready for another hefty Baxter science fiction tome, now that he’s done with the historicals. Also this month a brace of notable debuts (Superpowers by David J Schwartz, Principle of Angels by Jaine Fenn, and The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway — the last of which really sounds like it’s got a bit of everything, although the comparisons to Douglas Adams that have cropped up in a couple of places make me nervous) and Ellen Datlow’s Del Rey Book of SF & Fantasy.

July and beyond

The Locus forthcoming books issues and Amazon’s advance listings will only take you so far, and this is the point at which the future becomes misty. I’m sure there are many books scheduled for the second half of the year that I’ll want to read just as badly as the ones mentioned above. In August, the ones I know about and know something about are Ken MacLeod’s The Night Sessions (which, set “after the Middle East wars” in a time when “terrorism is history”, looks like a complement to The Execution Channel in a number of ways), Jo Walton’s Half a Crown (although I have some catch-up reading to do before I can read it), and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s collection The Ant King and Other Stories (which may give Bacigalupi’s book a run for its money); there’s also Sarah Hall’s next book, The Bottles, about which I only know the title. After that, there’s a new Kelly Link collection, The Wrong Grave and Other Stories; Lydia Millet’s new book How the Dead Dream (yes, I know it’s out in the US already — don’t tempt me); and, dare I hope, the fifth volume of Scott Pilgrim?

In short, it seems there’ll be enough to keep me out of trouble. What’s everyone else looking forward to?

At the request of a certain Vector editor, who forgot to post this before going to work, I’m here to take over Torque Control make the following announcement:

The guest for tonight’s BSFA meeting will be Robert Holdstock, interviewed by Paul Kincaid.

Venue (for the last time):
Upstairs room, The Star Tavern
6 Belgrave Mews West

As usual, the interview is due to start at 7pm, but the room is open from 6, and fans will be in the downstairs bar from 5.

There’s a map here.

Hope to see you all there,

Mystery Guest Poster x

At some point today I will try to put together a proper links post, since I have a hugenormous accumulation of links to deal with. But I have to get my head around this first: according to Jason Sanford, who got it from the SFWA Bulletin, Michael Chabon has joined the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

On the one hand, how cool is that? On the other hand, given SFWA’s recent and rather public string of cock-ups, and the disillusionment that seems to have pervaded large parts of the sf-writing community as a result, it seems downright surreal to see someone joining the organisation out of (I assume, since I can’t imagine that he needs to do it) principle.

Sighted in the wild, so here’s the contents:

A Letter from Daud al-Musafir al-Khilafahi bin ‘Ammar ibn al-Afrangi
Torque Control — editorial essay featuring interviews with Jo Walton and Guy Gavriel Kay
The Limits of Alternate History — by Edward James
History Around the Margins — by Juliet E. McKenna
History Repurposed: the Celestial Empire stories — by Chris Roberson
First Impressions — book reviews, edited by Paul N. Billinger
Obituary: Douglas Hill — by Jessica Yates
The New X — a column by Graham Sleight

I have to say, I’m happy with how this one turned out, so I hope y’all enjoy it. (And, of course, the first issue of Matrix under the stewardship of Ian Whates, which looks spiffing.) I may even get around to updating the website again. Next issue will be Vector‘s review of 2007, and will see some changes — but more about that closer to the time.

P.S. Less than 53 hours to get your nominations in for the BSFA Awards!