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.

(Photo nicked from Paul, because it’s better than the ones I took. Other photos on Flickr here.)

I’ve mentioned these a couple of times in passing, but here are some links to other reactions, both to the covers and to the choice of books:

• A poll at Instant Fanzine
• More discussion
• Andrew McKie’s thoughts

In passing, I should mention that the re-release of Fairyland was the nudge I needed to finally get around to reading it, and it is stunning — easily the best thing I’ve read by McAuley, and (as various people said last year, when I didn’t really believe them) quite possibly the Clarke of Clarkes.

There’s also a good interview with Simon Spanton at UKSF Book News, in which he summarises the impetus behind the promotion:

This year, aiming to do another promotion that would bring new readers to books on our list via innovative cover designs, we decided that we should look at the wealth of work we’ve built up from some of the contemporary writers on the Gollancz list. So we chose eight books that we hoped gave a good cross section of more recent SF but that would also be accessible to most readers. As with most ‘grand schemes’ dreamt up in the mighty engine rooms of publishing, the list was arrived at by a small group of people sitting around a table going ‘Oooh I love that book’ or ‘What about so-and-so?’ When it came to the covers we were, once again, able to take some of our cues from the SF4U promotion. Both times we were able to go to our art department and give them a pretty broad brief: ‘we want something that will make these books stand out, something different, something that will make SF fans take another look and which might provide people who don’t consider themselves readers of the genre but who have some sympathy with it and may have experimented in the past with an incentive to take a first look’.

I can’t help noting that this is not quite the same selection process that Jo Fletcher described at Eastercon.

See also: Gollancz’s new covers for Greg Egan’s books.

Should you choose to accept it: discuss the validity of the statistics and the conclusions drawn in these articles on women publishing in sf magazines, particularly the latter. (If you have questions about the methodology or the datasets, it may be more useful to ask them on the Strange Horizons forum than here.)

Lou Anders reports:

Christian Dunn of Solaris Books is excited to announce the acquisition of world mass-market rights for INFOQUAKE by David Louis Edelman, in a high-profile deal with Pyr, the SF/F imprint of Prometheus Books.

Good news. Also good news is the fact that Tor UK is starting to pick up on some Tor US books, which means we’re getting belated UK editions of Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, and Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania. Not to mention the fact that Stross’s The Atrocity Archives and A Family Trade are seeing UK publication this year.

Now all we need is for UK publishers to pick up Nalo Hopkinson, Elizabeth Bear, Catherynne Valente, Kage Baker, Susan Palwick, Kathleen Ann Goonan — oh, and a UK edition of Gwyneth Jones’s Life would be nice, while I’m wishing — and we’ll be getting somewhere.

Like various other members of this parish, a little while ago I received a proof of Charles Stross’ new novel, Halting State. I’ve been reading it (somewhat guiltily) alongside McAuley’s Fairyland, which makes for an interesting comparison in a number of ways that I hope to write about at some point. I’m also looking forward to seeing what others make of it, and in particular what they make of the style.

Poking around on the internet and in back-issues of Locus, NYRSF and Interzone last night, I discovered something a bit surprising: not many people have really examined Stross’s style. There’s Adam Roberts’ review of Accelerando, Graham Sleight touches on it in his NYRSF review of Singularity Sky, but really that’s about it. (Paul Kincaid also touches on matters of style in his review of Accelerando, but spends more time looking at — and is to my mind very perceptive about — the mindset Stross is applying to sf.) The only Stross that Gary Wolfe has reviewed, so far as I can tell, is The Atrocity Archives, and that not at great length; and though John Clute has reviewed a bit more, it’s a slightly oddball selection — Singularity Sky, the first two books of the Merchant Princes, and “Missile Gap”.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with focusing on what Stross is saying more than how he’s saying it; but Stross’s style, the way he uses geek idioms etc etc, is one of the most noticeable things about all his books, and at least in my experience tends to be something people comment on in casual conversations. So I’m hoping Halting State inspires some more reviews that look at what I will pompously call the aesthetic side of Stross’s writing — it seems to me that it should, because I’m coming to the conclusion that the choice to write the entire book in the second person throws Stross’s strengths and weaknesses into sharp relief. Admittedly, the two two reviews I’ve seen so far both note the style and then move on again to the ideas, so I may be imagining things and/or being overly optimistic. But Stross clearly put some thought into how the style interacts with the things any science fiction novel has to do —

The second person’s big strength is that it lets you show by doing, and it renders infodumps — those big, intrusive gobbets of metainformation that are so useful to the jobbing science fiction writer who’s trying to portray an unfamiliar world — transparent. (It’s big weakness is that if it isn’t done carefully, it feels like an itchy straitjacket to the reader, but you already know that, don’t you?) It’s not so much about metafiction as about metainformation for the fiction at the centre of the narrative process. If you fine-tune your use of the interior monologue you can illuminate your character’s experience of their universe, lending the “showing, not telling” narrative some experiential references and weight so that it feels familiar, even if it’s full of novel placeholders. And you can banish the old didactic mode for good, consigning it to the howling wilderness of pulpish prose where it belongs. (After all, we’re trying to commit literature here. Right?) You have the technology to tell this story the way it needs to be told. All you have to find now is the courage to use it.

— so it seems not only fair but necessary to talk about whether he succeeded in his goals.

Of course, I’m not saying this should be the only aspect of Stross’s work that people should talk about or even, necessarily, the first. I’m not completely comfortable with Jeff VanderMeer’s response to Matthew Cheney’s column about “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter” — “In short, the story feels not like cultural misappropriation so much as misappropriation of technique” — because I can’t imagine myself placing such a purely aesthetic response before all other possible responses. It’s just that it’s my perception that the aesthetic aspect of Stross’s work hasn’t yet received the examination it deserves.

Ernest Lilley clarifies his position on positive and negative reviews:

The only thing that we really try not to do is to run reviews where the reviewer rants from one end to the other and whose main objective seems to be to get even with an author for making them read a book they didn’t enjoy. My frequent comment to reviewers is that if it doesn’t grab you, put it down and we’ll get you another. On the other hand, if a book has flaws as well as strengths (and what doesn’t?) folks are welcome to point them out. Of course, what one person sees as a flaw may be another person’s strengths. Handled well, for instance, I like a bit of exposition in my fiction, and if a story doesn’t include new ideas I’m less likely to think well of it. I like plot too. For other reviewers though, the prose is the thing, and infodumps just get in way. I don’t think either is right or wrong, and part of the editorial job (handled ably and more often by Gayle Surrette than me) is to match book and reviewer.

See also John Berlyne’s comments, here and at SF Revu.

Those of you who follow the Velcro City Tourist Board may have noticed that it’s vanished from the interwebs. Paul’s asked me to pass on a message explaining the situation:

Basically, the server where VCTB is hosted appears to have had a database crash. Unfortunately, the helpful and generous local webgeek who runs it out of his own home machine is away in a muddy field for a German metal festival for the rest of the week, and hence there is little or no chance of the situation being changed until he returns. Normal (ahem) service will be resumed as soon as is possible.

Here’s hoping it gets fixed sooner rather than later.

The latest issue of Vector is out, and should be arriving on members’ doorsteps in the next couple of days. It’s our review of 2006, and here’s the lineup:

Torque Control — editorial
Vector Reviewers’ Poll — compiled by Paul N. Billinger
The SF Films of 2006 — Colin O’Dell and Mitch LeBlanc
What Kind Of Year Has It Been? SF on TV in 2006 — Abigail Nussbaum
The Year in Short Fiction — views on 2006’s short fiction from Claude Lalumiere, Paul Raven, David Soyka, Claire Brialey, Martin McGrath and Niall Harrison
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Paul N. Billinger
Particles — a books received column by Paul N. Billinger
The New X: Remaking History — a column by Graham Sleight

It has felt, to be honest, a little bit like this issue is cursed. All the content was ready at Easter, but production and various other difficulties cropped up to create delays. So apologies for that, and thanks to the contributors for their patience. Also, particular thanks to Liz for stepping up to handle layout for this issue.

Unfortunately — at least based on the samples the printer sent me — it looks like some copies of V252 are subject to a printing error in which pages 6 and 31 appear blank. If you find your copy has this problem, please email me with your details, and I’ll get a replacement out to you.

And there you have it. The default voice/viewpoint of F&SF is white, Middle American, male – and doesn’t even try to reach out and become the Other imaginatively. Where’s the alien archeologist exploring the remains of post-Catastrophe Terra, trying not to get shot by sling-armed natives as gtst loots, ahem, recovers the artifacts from the tombs of their ancestors, the Renaissance kabbalist trying tragically to wield mystic power against oppression in Isabella’s regime, the Queen of California’s reaction to conquistadors arriving on her shores as she saddles up the gryphons? Even the female writers self-identify with the patriarchy, even when reviewing Tiptree.

From here, which in all fairness is described as “a red-hot rant of a review”. The issue under discussion is the October/November 2006 issue — you’ll want to familiarise yourself with the table of contents here, since the reviewer pretty much expects you to know and just keep up. Let it be noted that the issue includes stories by Geoff Ryman (“The mind boggles – mine at least – at the amount of hubris and Western Privilege entailed in this endeavor, particularly given what I know about contemporary Cambodia”), Carol Emshwilller (“… nothing subversive or original here, yeah Strong Women On Their Own only they behave utterly conventionally in the Wimmen Are Naturally Wicked, Wanton, Jealous, Untrustworthy, Cruel & Uncooperative left to themselves without men to govern us”), and Paolo Bacigalupi (which is the part of the review that really made my head spin; it’s also how I discovered the post, since it links to my review, which obviously came over as less critical than intended), and that the patriarchy-self-identifying Tiptree reviewer mentioned is Elizabeth Hand.

EDIT: Just to be clear about this: the reason the above-linked review frustrated me, and the reason I linked to it, is not that I disagree with its assessments of the stories under consideration, though I do in almost every case, but that by being so sloppy in detail, by drawing such damning conclusions about the beliefs of the authors in question on the basis of such weak evidence, and by embracing such a hostile tone it makes itself too easy to dismiss. That seems a waste to me, because the actual issues involved are, self-evidently, important.

I wouldn’t blame my postman if he hated me. He’s never given me cause to believe that he does, on the odd occasions when I actually see him, but I wouldn’t blame him. I got home last night to find one of those we-tried-to-deliver-but-you-were-out cards, with a tick in the too-big-for-your-letterbox box, and a big “X 5!” written in marker pen next to it. So I collected the above pile from my local sorting office on the way to work. The haul:

From bottom to top: that’s Nova Swing and The Green Glass Sea (loans being returned by Chance), Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow (Clarke submission; “an ancient race of lycanthropes survives in modern L.A. … Sharp Teeth is a novel-in-verse that blends epic themes with dark humour, dogs playing cards, crystal meth labs, and acts of heartache and betrayal in Southern California”); The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod, Saturn Returns by Sean Williams, Glasshouse by Charles Stross, and Dark Space by Marianne de Pierres (Clarke submissions all, from Orbit; now, if we can only persude Gollancz to be as efficient); and three Shaun Hutson novels (review copies, for Strange Horizons). Not pictured: my Amazon order, which did get left for me, and consisted of The New Space Opera and Mister Pip. Oh, and that thing in the background is an Orbit messenger bag, “to mark the launch of” their new website. Guess they’re trying to create some buzz after all.