I wasn’t going to make any reading resolutions for 2008, or at least not any major ones — what’s the point of being free from award-submission reading if I can’t go where my whims take me for a while, after all? But then I came across Larry’s post, and while not everything he says goes for me (I definitely don’t want to review at least 50 books in 2008; maybe more like 30), most of it does. Additional to those, then, I’ll add:

1. Read The Baroque Cycle. This is the sort of thing I’ll never get around to reading unless I make a project of it, not because I don’t want to read it — I badly do — but because it’s so big that I’ll want to wander off and read something shorter half-way through. But if I say, up front, that I’m going to read The Baroque Cycle this year, I might actually manage it.

2. Read A Suitable Boy. Back when I started seeing the ever-radiant Nic (yes, of Eve’s Alexandra fame), we agreed that we would each read five books that the other recommended. She’s read most of mine; I’m way behind. In my defense, this is because one of her picks is this, Vikram Seth’s 1500-page opus, forced on me in a second-hand bookshop when I dared express a preference for short books. As of May, my excuse for not reading it will expire, so if I suddenly fall silent sometime that month, you’ll know why.

3. Catch up on my YA reading. I’ve accumulated quite a little pile of YA titles over the past eighteen months or so — Octavian Nothing, The Green Glass Sea, Flora Segunda, Life As We Knew It, How I Live Now — and this seems like a good time to finally get around to reading them. Plus, they should be nice an d quick, which will balance out the Seth/Stephenson effect.

4. Read for parallax. I’ve been playing around with ideas of what books I want to write about here. I suspect most of my reviews of new sf titles will go to other places — Vector, Strange Horizons, NYRSF and Foundation. What I think I want to do here is, on the one hand, short fiction, and on the other, clusters of books that I haven’t read before but that (in theory) resonate in some way. So, for example, I might do a climate change binge including some or all of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, Mary Rosenblum’s Water Rites, Maggie Gee’s The Flood, TC Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, and Stephen Baxter’s (forthcoming) Flood. (What’s the first climate change novel? Do we count The Kraken Wakes?)

All-in, I think I’m going to aim for about 60 books in 2008; I find that reading at the rate I’ve been doing for the past couple of years doesn’t leave enough time for thinking, let alone writing. But we’ll see how it goes.

A slightly belated announcement, on account of only just having returned to the Land of Internet after moving house. (Did you all have a good Christmas?) The editorial address for Vector is now:

73 Sunderland Avenue
Oxford
OX2 8DT

I’m not sure if I’m going to bother with a year-end post; given that about 60 of the about 80 books I’ve read this year were for the Clarke Award, I wouldn’t have much to say. But I might come up with a recommendation or two.

In small online sf magazine Helix, sf author John Barnes argues that sf is dead of simple old age:

And, to return to the observation that might be the point of all this, the good stuff, the stuff that marks the contribution of the genre to the culture as a whole, tends to fall within that about-three-generation span of life. A side observation is that nearly every genre will have its own pet explanations for why it died; the disappearance of the middle-class spontaneous theatergoer and theatrical unions, the cultural change in personal integrity so that no one really believes “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” anymore, girls having better options than becoming nurses and marrying doctors, the generations of civil peace in the nineteenth century draining Gothic novels of their force, and so on and so forth. Science fiction has several versions of this, including rising irrationality, “the world is all science fiction now anyway,” political correctness, political neanderthalism, and “they aren’t like they were when I was a kid.” What I am saying here is this: genres last about seventy years as live things. It was time. Grandma died because she was old, not because you were bad.

[…]

Furthermore, the cultural hole that gave rise to the genre is plugged, now — the genre is plugging it and getting better at plugging it every year. And the culture itself is moving on (Westerns flourished when the frontier was still in living memory, and for perhaps a generation after; the disappearance of the frontier is a quaint historical fact now, but it was a thunderclap in the culture of 1930). The surrounding culture just doesn’t feel the old lack nearly as much. The genre is no longer filling a key place in people’s emotional lives; it’s just something they grew up reading/watching/listening to, comfort food for the brain rather than exotic cuisine.

Meanwhile, in national British newspaper The Times, mainstream author and critic Bryan Appleyard argues that sf is more relevant than ever:

The point is that SF is, in fact, the necessary literary companion to science. How could fiction avoid considering possible futures in a world of perpetual innovation? And how could science begin to believe in itself as wisdom, rather than just truth, without writers scouting out the territory ahead? Which is why this widely despised genre should be read now more than ever. Unfortunately, as Aldiss and Brake agree, this does not seem to be a great time for the production, never mind the reception, of SF. The classical age – of Wells, Lem and Dick – seems to be behind us, and the emerging genre of New Weird, led by Britain’s China Miéville, shades too much into fantasy and horror to be strictly classified as SF, a genre that must remain true to a certain level of logic and realism. But one can try Greg Bear, a practitioner of old-fashioned “hard” SF, the kind that, like the work of Michael Crichton, sticks most closely to real current science. Bear’s celebrated Blood Music is a brilliantly horrible vision of genetics gone wrong. Or there’s another Brit, Stephen Baxter, who writes hard SF strongly influenced by HG Wells; or Iain M Banks (Iain Banks’s SF guise), who has written a series of novels about the Culture, an alien civilisation existing in parallel to the human. Banks’s emphasis is more philosophical than strictly scientific, and seems to descend from the supreme practitioner of philosophical SF, Olaf Stapledon, a man incapable of writing about anything less than everything.

[…]

But if new hard, logical, shingly-beach SF is now a rarity, at least there’s a lot of old stuff to read. The literary snobs will say it’s badly written, which most of it is. So is most “literary” fiction. Badly written literary fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There’s a lot of badly written SF that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is necessary. So, watch Blade Runner for the seventh time, or curl up with Aldiss’s Omnibus. And remember, it’s all happening now.

Comments: I don’t think the world has turned as topsy-turvy as it first appears, because I don’t think Barnes and Appleyard are talking about the same thing. Barnes is talking about genre sf, and he might have a point about its obsolescence; but he goes too far, because even if the genre is dead that says nothing about the health or otherwise of the larger mode, which is what Appleyard seems to be interested in, even if his contemporary examples are all genre sf writers.

I’m actually almost more interested in Appleyard’s assertion that “this does not seem to be a great time for the production […] of sf”. Leaving aside the fact that I’m not sure I could stomach referring to Greg Bear as one of the lights in the darkness (although at the same time, comparing him to Michael Crichton seems cruel even to me), and the fact that I’m not actually even convinced there is a darkness, it says something to me that the commentator sitting outside looking in sees a blip, while the commentator sitting inside looking around sees The End.

What’s the BSI, you ask? This is the BSI:

The Big Scary Idea: The Big Scary Business Plan

The quick story: back in late spring of ‘06, Jason sits on my office couch and says, “Think of a way to save science fiction publishing.”

This was the result.

[…]

General Company Description

BSI is the first all-media, advertising-supported speculative fiction website providing both pro-selected and user-rated content with popularity-based revenue sharing for all content providers.

This follows on, of course, from the latest round of discussions about sf magazines and the survival thereof. But you should go and have a look at it, because it’s long, reasonably detailed, will probably answer at least some of the immediate questions you have about it, and in among the community-focused web 2.0 utopianism there’s some food for thought.

So what we have is a one-stop, does-everything website. You go to BSI to read sf stories, watch sf short films, read sf reviews or other related nonfiction, or look at sf art. And because the design is about enabling as much as about providing, you can contribute any of the above yourself. Everything can be rated and commented on. Everything is free-to-browse; the website is funded through a combination of adverts, sponsorships, donations, and a couple of other sources. Contributors then get paid in proportion to how often their stuff gets looked at.

My first reaction is that with the exception of the $1M launch competition, I have very little doubt that this model, or one like it, would work. There doesn’t seem to be much in the proposal that’s new; there are already similarly structured, but not sf-focused, websites making healthy money using these ideas. Moreover, while print prose sf certainly isn’t dead or dying, it is (paging Dr Roberts!) clearly no longer the dominant form in which sf exists. If you are trying to find an audience for sf, focusing on the stuff that’s made of sentences won’t cut it; multimedia is the way to go.

The question in my mind, then, is: is this a website that I would want to visit? These are the people the BSI sees as its audience:

• Rabid Fan. Science fiction or fantasy reader. Goes to conventions. Gets in heated debates about Star Trek flavors. The middle-aged white male. We don’t want to irritate this person so much that they leave the site. Most likely to donate money to us.
• Casual Fan. People who enjoy science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies, as well as television such as Buffy and Serenity. Broad range, skewing male. We want to appeal to this person so much they invite their friends to come.
• Progressive. Someone who’s interested in progressive thoughts, ideas, and futurism, but eschews the fan mentality. Broad range, also skews male. We want to have content that appeals to this person.

Technically speaking, I’m not any of these people. I’m too young to be a rabid fan, but I’m clearly more than a casual fan. (As an aside, I am far from convinced that the ‘casual fan’ category skews male — at least, not judging by TV fandoms as they are represented on my livejournal friendslist, which I admit is not scientific.) Practically speaking, though, I probably do fall into the rabid fan category. I rarely get into debates about which version of Star Trek is best (because it’s obviously DS9), but I go to conventions, I read truckloads, I watch lots of sf television and film, and then I write about it all.

So I’m one of the people that the BSI doesn’t want to irritate so much that I leave the site. However, they’re starting from a disadvantage, in that there are reasons I very rarely visit existing advertising-funded community-oriented sites like Fark and SomethingAwful: it’s because they are usually annoying websites filled with idiots for whom I have very little patience. The community sites that I do use — such as livejournal — are based much more on peer-to-peer interactions than multi-valency community interactions, so I can choose who and what I want to read. In a way, the most optimistic aspect of the BSI, it seems to me, isn’t the financial and business side, it’s the idea that a space can be created where all the various kinds of sf fan that now exist will want to congregate together, when the past decade seems to suggest that most people are more comfortable off in their own multiple splinter fandoms.

Against that, what is there for me at BSI? Short fiction edited by a professional editor — let’s say, for the sake of argument, Ellen Datlow — that’s good. But I didn’t go to the parts of SciFi.com that weren’t SCIFICTION very often, and I still don’t. Would I go there to watch new video? If it was professionally produced, perhaps, but by and large I don’t have much time for fan productions, and when it comes to user-created content I don’t have huge amounts of faith in the wisdom of crowds. Would I go there for discussion and debate? Possibly; but I already have plenty of smart people I can talk to about stuff, and I’m sceptical that such a large site could live up to that level of conversation. Never mind the fact that occasionally — just occasionally — I like to enjoy content that isn’t sf-related. All of which can be boiled down to this: I don’t need another time-sink, and the BSI looks, by design, like a big time-sink.

So to answer my earlier question, no, it’s probably not a site I would want to visit much. The thing is, for the success of the site, that’s irrelevant. The BSI isn’t really aimed at me, and it doesn’t need me. By extension, it probably doesn’t need most of the people reading this; and to create a new, sustainable sf magazine, I suspect that’s exactly the sort of thinking that’s needed.

Sam Thompson in the LRB, reviewing The Steep Approach to Garbadale earlier this year:

When Fielding tells him that ‘history is finished . . . Capitalist democracy has won and the rest is mopping up,’ Alban replies: ‘Bullshit. You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads SF comes out with this crap about the end of history.’ Much of Banks’s own science fiction features an anarchist paradise called The Culture, a galaxy-spanning, ‘post-scarcity’ civilisation in which everyone harmoniously does just as they like, thanks to transcendentally high technology, infinite productive capacity and the benign supervision of prodigiously powerful artificial intelligences. It reads as the utopian solution to the wrongs that enrage Alban, an alternative set of rules by which humans might play. No wonder science fiction readers are right-thinking people – they have seen the answers. But the problem, back at the beginning of the 21st century, is that there is no obvious way of getting there from here. The other side of SF utopianism is something close to despair, with Alban denouncing the shortcomings of the present: ‘Stupidity and viciousness were rewarded, illegality not just tolerated but encouraged, lying profoundly worked, and torture was justified – even lauded. Meanwhile the whole world was warming up, getting ready to drown … Everybody should know better. Nobody did.’

Brian Aldiss, writing in the Guardian, today:

For a while after the second world war, a spirit of optimism prevailed in SF magazines. It was a time of great projects, when rockets reached Mars, or we held what wars were available on Pluto, or we even dreamed of fleets of ships reaching far into the galaxy. […] But then the future went the other way – a duller, yet more dangerous way. The cold war began to blow instead. The lights went out in Cybernetics City.

Here is today, 2007, with its diseased ideas of drugs, Darfur disputes and suicide bombers. The truth is that we are at last living in an SF scenario. Little wonder the tiger is almost extinct, the polar bear doomed. How do you think the algae feel, in the great wastes of warming ocean? Can you not hear the ecosystems crashing down? Ideal fodder for SF, one might think. However, one might not if one was brought up on Isaac Asimov and AE van Vogt. SF is not designed for realism but for imagination. Our new and creepy scenario is already in the hands of the scientists, if not MGM.

The latest BSFA mailing dropped through my letterbox today. It’s a full one — Vector, Matrix, Focus, plus an awards ballot and a letter to members. Here’s the contents for Vector:

Torque Control — editorial
Best of British — Jo Fletcher interviewed by Graham Sleight
An Introduction to Anna Kavan’s Ice — by Christopher Priest
Politics Is What Humans Do — Richard Morgan interviewed by Martin Lewis
A report on the first SF Foundation Masterclass — by Paul Raven
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Paul N. Billinger
Particles — a books received column by Paul N. Billinger
The New X: Lost in Translation — a column by Graham Sleight

In other shiny BSFA news: the new website is live. There are a bunch of holding pages there at the moment, and undoubtedly some bugs to iron out, but you can get an idea of the feel of it, and subscribe to the RSS feed. (And here’s a livejournal feed for those who might want it.)

And in other news, I’m off to Italy on Saturday for a week of holiday. (I am taking these books, and no doubt one or two more that I cram into my bag at the last minute.) Before I go, however, I will post my much-delayed review of Subterranean 7 (the issue guest-edited by Ellen Datlow). They say people don’t read 4,000 word blog posts, but I figure if I give you all a week you’ll get through it. Right?

I’ve changed the comment posting settings, from “all comments get posted” to “person posting must have a previously approved comment”, because (a) the blog is picking up a bit more spam than it used to and (b) I can no longer access the site during the daytime to deal with said spam. Hopefully this won’t cause too much hassle. What I don’t know is whether it will remember who I approved last time I had this setting switched on; if a couple of people wanted to post a test comment in response to this post, while I’m around and able to approve it, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Gwyneth Jones:

It’s not that feminist analysis in an sf format is out of date. The story is as relevant as ever it was, and the books are still being written. Timmi Duchamp’s Alanya series is a case in point, Janine Cross’s Touched By Venom also comes to mind: I haven’t read it, but the harsh sexual tone sounds rather like Tiptree (people forget just how brutal some of Tiptree’s sexual stories were). But it’s a niche market, a minority interest: whereas the kind of fem-sf reading that the popular audience will read and buy has become practically indistinguishable from mainstream feminine sf. Stories where “girls get to be guys”, either on Space Patrol on with a swashbuckly sword and a feathery hat, will always be popular. Stories celebrating feminine culture, even when men are blame for everything evil, and women have been innocent bystanders for all the millennia, are also comfort fare. They’re womanly. They offer no challenge to conventional, or hyper-conventional “separate development” views on gender role. In short, we’re not in the seventies any more. Feminists who write genre have to address the realities of a changed world. I’d been thinking that since long before 2001. Actually, once you’ve done your “sexual politics” novel or two, you should want to move on. You want to take what you’ve learned about the human condition, and use it in fiction that has no visible connection with women’s lib —except that it’s the work of someone who never forgets that dimension.

(Go read the whole thing, because it comes with an interesting assessment of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s In War Times, among other things.)

I apologise for the silence over the past week or so, but unfortunately things aren’t likely to get any livelier around here for a little while yet. There are several reasons: one is that I’m about to start a new job, and I’m expecting the first couple of weeks to be very much a hit-the-ground-running, affair; a second is that said job involves a somewhat longer commute than I have at present, which leaves correspondingly less time in the evenings for things like blogging (I should be moving house in the short-to-medium term, but this in itself is not an un-time-consuming process); and a third is that it’s reached that time of year when pretty much all my reading energies have to go into Clarke books, which I can’t talk about. (More immediately, I’m also off to Truck Festival for the weekend, which was postponed due to floods earlier this year.) There’s a BSFA mailing on the way, and I’ll try to get around to updating the website, and I’m sure I’ll manage to get something up here once a week or so, even if it’s only a link round-up. In the meantime, any of the links in the sidebar to the right should take you to interesting substitute reading material.

This may become the first in a short series of short posts on aspects of Paul McAuley’s 1995 novel Fairyland, or it may end up orphaned and alone. In either case the place to start is, what kind of novel is it? Here is a paragraph from near the start of the novel, which is surely science fiction:

Old London Town is growing strange and exotic in the grip of what they are now calling the Great Climatic Overturn. Lights drift past the minicab like stars seen from some hyperlight spaceship. Streetlights, the scattered lights of the tower blocks behind screens of hardy sycamores and ginkgoes, the lights of the pyramid-capped tower of Canary Wharf rising into the sodium orange sky. A helicopter slowly crosses the sky from west to east, the needle of its laser spotlight intermittently stabbing amongst the flat roofs of deck access housing. (35)

And here is a paragraph from near the end, which must be fantasy:

Everything is so clear, so bright. A wash of huge, blurry stars arches overhead. The glow of the half-moon that hangs above the treeline seems to be focused into a kind of temple of vaporous illumination in the middle of the road. Within that distilled light, a host of fairies and other creatures flank the two figures sitting on high-backed spiky chairs fretted from thin white spars that might be the bones of extinct birds. (311)

If I hadn’t just told you these come from the same book, would you guess? If I didn’t already know, I don’t think I would. The first is London refracted through the lens of cyberpunk: urban, alienated, the sense of a very limited, street-level perspective on the world. In the second, the location is not clearly specified (it happens to be Albania), but it could easily be another world; the city is missing, and with it the sense that the landscape is defined by human action; the temple and the road could easily be fairy creations. And there is nothing, in that paragraph, to indicate that the fairies described are something other than the creatures of myth, while there is quite a bit to make them seem romantic, enigmatic, magical.

The similarity between the two paragraphs, of course, is that they spend a lot of time describing the nature and quality of the light that illuminates their scene — artificial and scattered in the first case, natural and focused in the second. From the start, Fairyland-the-place is defined by light, and like so much else about the book, it works metaphorically and literally. As a boy, the main character, Alex Sharkey, is told by his mother that the lights of London at night are the lights of Fairyland, and the book’s story is, in part, the tale of Alex searching for the place where those lights become real. But Fairyland is also a book about how we draw on old stories to understand the new world around us, and the difference between the two paragraphs reflects that: as the light in which the world is seen changes, so too must the language with which it is described.

Note that both views are, in a sense, familiar: the first paragraph as representative of a type of near-future sf, the second paragraph as representative of an older type of story. Part of what makes Fairyland special is how convincingly it describes a transition between the two. The shift is more gradual and detailed and sustained than it is in, say, Geoff Ryman’s Air, which also draws on fantasy to find a way of understanding the future. And in Fairyland the shift is never total or irreversible in the way that the end of Air seems to be which makes it, in a way, more haunting. Every glimpse of Fairyland is partial or temporary, and the second paragraph above is, in fact, an illusion — except that at the same time, it is exactly the place Alex has been seeking. So although paragraphs of the second type are more common the deeper into the book you read, the predominant sense is one of urgency. You feel Fairyland getting closer to the surface, closer to breaking through and becoming real.