I’ve just spent about an hour I should probably have spent doing other things reading Matt Denault’s thorough, and impressively timely, Readercon report, then looking for other Readercon-related posts. (Having done a Wiscon, Readercon is my next US con target; I’m hoping to make it over next year, though I suspect other things are going to get in the way.) Inevitably, what snagged my eye was the notes on the “Reviewing in the Blogosphere” panel. Here’s the description:

A guide to what’s online, and a discussion of the ways in which online reviewing differs from the print variety. What are the good and bad aspects of the more personal and informal tone of much online criticism?

John Clute, Kathryn Cramer, Jim Freund (M), Ernest Lilley, Tom Purdom, Gordon Van Gelder

While accepting that Matt’s comments are paraphrases of what was said, and that 500 words is necessarily going to leave a lot out, I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed with the way this panel apparently went. You could say the fact that the title doesn’t match up to the description is one warning sign; the makeup of the panel is another. Let’s review.

John Clute needs no introduction. In the online world, he writes a column for Sci-Fi Weekly, occasional reviews for Strange Horizons, and has even posted reviews on his blog … sort of. Kathryn Cramer blogs, and is an editor at NYRSF. Jim Freund is the host of a long-running NY radio show, Hour of the Wolf, in which sf writers and professionals are interviewed; the shows are archived online. Ernest Lilley is Senior Editor at SF Revu; Tom Purdom is a music critic, and writes online for the Broad Street Review, but is obviously better known around these parts as a writer. Gordon Van Gelder is, of course, editor of F&SF, but also wrote a fair number of reviews for NYRSF in its early days. (I have the issue with his piece on “Kirinyaga” in; it’s good.)

This is, in other words, a panel that reads online science fiction reviews more than it writes or edits them, and probably a panel that reads print science fiction reviews more than online science fiction reviews. This is not a problem per se, since it’s a panel of smart people who have written or edited reviews (or both), but you do get the sense that there’s a side of the debate missing. In a comment on the FantasyBookSpot forum, Matt notes that he would have liked to see at least one “respected advocate of blog reviews” on the panel, and I can only agree. Of course, by raising the panel topic here, online, I’ll probably get responses biased in the other direction; but such is life.

On to the specifics of the report:

John Clute led off by saying that he found writing for online publications to be enabling and freeing, in that he could take as many words as needed to convey his review, and his work was less likely to be edited to suit the knowledge and expectations of a singular imagined readership (because online websites are still trying to determine their audiences).

I think freedom is the first thing most people would point to as an advantage of online publication. There is, admittedly, a risk of writing long because you can, rather than because you need to, but it’s a tradeoff worth having. The point about audience is more interesting. Having an audience in mind makes it easier to write — I assume people reading this, for instance, have a certain level of familiarity with the sf field, which is why I said that John Clute should need no introduction; if I assumed my audience was the entire internet, John Clute would almost certainly need an introduction. But this is, perhaps, one way in which online writing is different to print publication: it is possible to write just from a need to say something, and let the audience find you. Or at least, this is possible with blogging; I think online magazines still need to know their audience, if only because the act of calling something a magazine assumes an audience, while a blog, to start with, is an individual.

Gordon Van Gelder commented that the lack of editorial presence at most online websites has led to a proliferation of bad reviews. Tom Purdom agreed about the value of an editor. […] Ernest Lilley mentioned that at the website of which he is the editor, he exerts a high degree of editorial control, hardly ever publishing a negative review and keeping reviews to a limited word count.

Oh, how I wish they were naming names. Or, if they were naming names, how I wish that Matt was reporting them. As you might expect, I strongly disagree with Lilley’s positive-reviews policy. I think constant praise is meaningless, verging on dishonest. As for limited word count, well, we’ve been down that path before. I do agree that brief reviews fill a need, but (a) I think they have to be firmly edited (Rose Fox has some good points on how to write short reviews effectively), and (b) I don’t think they take advantage of online publishing’s strengths, to wit the freedom mentioned earlier. And there are people who take advantage of that freedom. I have some sympathy with Kathryn Cramer’s argument that blogs exert a selection pressure in favour of short, regular posts; but, you know, this is also a world with Eve’s Alexandria and Asking The Wrong Questions in it. Will their content pass Clute’s test, to be worth reading ten years from now? I suspect some of it will, yes.

The other strength of online publishing, of course, is interactivity, and the speed of that interactivity. Which brings me to some of the most baffling of the statements attributed to the panel (not counting Clute’s statement that “contextual links ‘violate the contract of the sentence'”, which just makes it sound like he’s never heard of tabbed browsing):

The panelists talked about the ability that online reviews often grant readers to quickly comment on reviews; the panelists saw this as a negative, as leading people to write reviews in order to have a personal audience.

I would love to get some expansion on this from those on the panel, because I can’t see that it makes any sense at all. One: who else should reviewers write for, if not an audience? Reviewing is about advocacy, about saying “read this book,” or “don’t read this book.” Two: did the panel really think, as this summary seems to indicate, that there are people up there who start review-blogs as a path to internet fame and fortune — or that there is a goldmine of potential serious critics lured away to be superficial bloggers? Because I can’t see much evidence for either position, but I can’t see other ways of interpreting “in order to have a personal audience” as a bad thing. Three: what’s wrong with quick comments? To paraphrase Martin, a review is dead until someone reacts to it, and I don’t see the difference between a comment posted to a blog (or to, say, the reviews published at Locus Online) and a comment emailed to NYRSF.

I’m going to end by quoting the panel description again —

A guide to what’s online, and a discussion of the ways in which online reviewing differs from the print variety. What are the good and bad aspects of the more personal and informal tone of much online criticism?

— and throwing it open to the floor. What’s out there? What’s good and bad about it? Let’s do the panel right here.

Via Graham, an interesting distinction from a Readercon panel, specifically the “real year” panel yesterday.

Advocacy-based sf — “you need to go off and build the future I’m describing”
Recognition-based sf — “this is the world we’re in or arriving at, and we can’t do anything about”

Examples given of advocacy-based sf: classic example Heinlein, current example Kim Stanley Robinson. I don’t know what examples of recognition-based sf they came up with, but I’d imagine something like Ian McDonald’s River of Gods would count, or John Brunner.

Points for discussion:

1. The panel apparently took it as axiomatic that science fiction is either advocacy- or recognition-based. True or false?

(Geneva’s suggested a third category that would cover, e.g. R.A. Lafferty, Cordwainer Smith, some of Lem, or a book like Nova Swing: alienation-based sf. This could be considered a branch of recognition-based sf focused on how it is/would be impossible for us to recognise truly futuristic futures or alien aliens.)

2. John Clute asserted that “characteristic modern sf” is about recognition. True or false? Where do you put a book like Geoff Ryman’s Air, or Charles Stross’s Accelerando?

3. Does the advocacy-recognition split exclude straightforwardly escapist literature (e.g. Star Wars)? Does this matter?

From the latest ansible. I’m not actually sure if this is by Ursula Le Guin, or by Langford after Le Guin sent him the inspirational quote: “Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” But either way it’s rather good.

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly … but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn’t rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn’t rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. […]

And topical, too.

UPDATE, 14/10/07: per Le Guin’s recent letter to Cory Doctorow, I have truncated my quote from OSL. You can (and should) read the whole thing at the Ansible linked above.

Via Bookslut, David Mitchell interviewed about his next novel. Note the disclaimer — “Such scrutiny freaks me out a little …. How the book ends up looking and how I might describe it now could be two very different beasties” — but it sounds promising. The short version is “Napoleonic-era saga set in Nagasaki.” The longer version:

I will say that my intention is to write a bicultural novel, where Japanese perspectives are given an equal weight to Dutch/European perspectives. It’s the most demanding thing I’ve ever tried to do. The research is a trackless swamp, and the book wishes to be written in ways that historical novels are not usually written in. It feels as if I am having to invent its “cinematography” as I go along.

[…]

You can only lay claim to a deep knowledge of a culture if you study it, live in it, get to know some of its people and learn its language, and most of us are too busy to do this more than once or twice a lifetime. So these “oven-ready perspectives” are what we fall back on, and they are probably better than nothing, provided that we don’t forget that they only scratch the surface. We mustn’t tell ourselves, “OK, I’ve got Japanese/UK/Any country culture sussed: I can stop trying to understand it now.” Opinions based on the perspectives you mention should be pending and conditional, in pencil and not ink.

And intriguingly, on the interrelationship of fiction and history:

If the question is asking, “Does fiction influence the perception of history?” then my answer is “Yes, and then some.” The skeleton of my knowledge of Classical Rome comes from Robert Graves; Victorian London, from Dickens; of Taisho and Showa Japan, from Tanizaki and Mishima and Akutagawa. Is there anything wrong with this, as long as writers write with integrity and readers remember they are reading fiction? Historians, too, are in the subjective narrative business, albeit narratives that try to capture the facts and facts only, those slippery eels. Witness the never-ending school history textbook debate between Japan and its neighbors: What are the facts? It depends on the teller.

Partly because of this, I decided very early on that my new novel must be set in a nearby parallel universe — one where global history is the same as ours, but the local history of Nagasaki is one of my own invention. This gives me the license I need to create my own cast, plot and locations, and frees me from having to spend the next two or three years as a researcher of vanished minutiae.

Without wanting to read too much into his words, I do find it interesting that he describes it as a parallel universe. It seems to me to imply, particularly when coming from an author with Mitchell’s demonstrated familiarity with genre tropes, something a bit more than the historical novel’s usual flexibility with regard to dates and events. At the same time, though, to what degree do historical novels owe fidelity to their period? I admit that one of the things that bothered me about Half of a Yellow Sun was that Adichie freely admits changing around the order of events in the Nigeria-Biafra war to improve the story, which felt at odds with her desire to bear witness to that history. And how much can you change a local history before the gap left by ignoring the knock-on effects that will inevitably have on the rest of the world starts to become obvious? (Linking to recent discussions on instant fanzine is left as an exercise for the reader.)

I have recently been browsing my way through Brave New Words, Jeff Prucher’s dictionary of science fiction words. Rarely have I been a happier geek. There’s just something satisfying about reading through detailed citations for skimmer, skinsuit, slan, slash (although can the first usage of “slash” as a noun really be as late as 1984?), sleeper ship, slidewalk, slideway … and then coming to that most contentious of terms, slipstream.

slipstream n. [after MAINSTREAM] literature which makes use of the tropes or techniques of genre science fiction or fantasy, but which is not considered to be genre science fiction or fantasy; the genre of such literature. Hence slipstreamer, n., slipstreamish, adj., slipstreamy, adj.

1989 B. Sterling SF Eye (July) 78/2: We could call this kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books “slipstream.

1992 Locus (Aug.) 11/3: “In Concert” is a slipstream story about an amateur rock musician in Sevastapol trying to gain entry into the stadium.

1995 SFRA Rev. (May-June) 54: A slipstreamy science fiction story about a virus that causes a rather peculiar neurological dysfunction with satisfyingly serendipitous results.

1995 Interzone (61/2): Territories issue four is subtitled the sf and slipstream journal. In this context, the meaning of “slipstream” is refreshingly unpretentious, something along the lines of “non-SF things that are likely to interest SF readers.”

2002 Locus (Sept.) 15/1: The January issue of The Silver Web is their fifteenth, and editor Ann Kennedy chooses a decidedly slipstreamish mix.

2003 D.G. Hartwell & K. Cramer Intro. in Year’s Best Fantasy 3 xv: On noticeable trend evidence in some of these is toward non-genre, or genre-bending, or slipstream fantastic fiction.

2003 P. Di Filippo Asimov’s SF (Apr.) 132/1: The British fantasist Steve Erikson (not to be confused with US slipstreamer Steve Erickson) extends the vision of his fantasy land of Malazan.

2003 C. Priest Guardian (London) (Internet) (June 14): It includes rather than categorises — while not being magic realism, or fantasy, or science fiction, slipstream literature includes many examples of these.

See the definition change before your eyes! We’ll have to see if the panel at this year’s Readercon agrees …

(I wonder what the rationale is for giving the author for the cites from Asimov’s and The Guardian not not those from Locus or Interzone? Must have a poke around in the notes at the front to see if this is explained. Although I’m guessing the 2002 cite is Rich Horton.)

Abigail Nussbaum reviews the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist:

You can’t please everyone, especially when it comes to awards, but the Arthur C. Clarke award often seems to go out of its way not to please anyone. Precariously perched atop the genre divide, the award has enraged insiders, who view it as trying to curry favour with the mainstream establishment by nominating literary and unclassifiable fiction, and ruffled the feathers of outsiders, who accuse it of trying to appropriate the same fiction, thus gaining the genre some undeserved credibility. This year’s shortlist is a perfect demonstration of such schizophrenia. The novels on it range from the barely publishable to the sublime, with just about every flavor and possible definition of science fiction represented: thrillers (one successful, the other most decidedly not) with SF sprinkles; outsider SF with its trademark shoddy worldbuilding; literary fiction with a vague SFnal connection; commentary on the genre; even a genuine, honest-to-God technically oriented story set in the future.

On Streaking:

One almost suspects Stableford of making a direct appeal to his readers, desperately striving to justify this plodding, over-written, under-plotted, slow-paced, hilariously awful mess of a novel. Even if it weren’t a complete and utter fallacy to argue that, in fiction, what you have to say matters more than how you say it, the fact remains that Streaking has so very, very little to say.

On End of the World Blues:

End of the World Blues is an effective thriller, which means that the cliché works, and if it weren’t for the novel’s deeply disturbing treatment of its female characters I would have no hesitation in calling it an enjoyable read.

On Hav:

Morris’s Hav is nothing but an agglomeration of extraordinarily common attributes, given an imaginary name and location. Her sole act of creation in bringing Hav to life is the Cathar conspiracy, and by her own admission this element of the story is symbolic. More importantly, it is unsuccessful–if Hav were science fiction, we’d have to take Morris to task for shoddy worldbuilding.

On Gradisil:

What’s most remarkable about Gradisil is that, in spite of the bleakness of its message, it isn’t a depressing novel. It achieves this effect in much the same way that Deadwood does–by being entirely persuasive. In its best parts, Gradisil reads like a history of a future that hasn’t happened yet–depressing, because it confirms our worst suspicions about human nature, but true, and therefore compelling and impossible to ignore.

On Oh Pure and Radiant Heart:

In spite of this problematic ending, however, there is enough that’s remarkable about Oh Pure and Radiant Heart to mark it out as one of the finest, most intelligent and most beautifully written novels I’ve read this year, and while it probably doesn’t belong on the shortlist for a science fiction award, it is worthy of recognition and acclaim.

On Nova Swing:

In 2002, Harrison published Light (which was nominated for–and should have won–the 2003 Clarke award), a breathtaking space opera which ended on a curious and atypical note of hope and forgiveness. Nova Swing, a companion piece to Light which takes place in the same universe, might be seen as Harrison’s attempt to back away from this seeming change of heart, but its more quiet benevolence very nearly puts Light to shame, making it seem almost bombastic in comparison.

The BSFA now has a facebook group, here. Mmm, shiny.

Dan Green on the experience of reading Interfictions:

Reading the book as a collection of stories that are “willfully transgressive in a noncategorical way” did me no good at all. Notwithstanding that most of them were “transgressive,” when at all, in rather tepid and formally uninteresting ways, I simply was unable to understand what they shared in common that made them “interfictions.” The editors’ narrowing of focus to the contest between “realism” and genre fiction did allow me to reexamine the stories in this more concentrated light.
[…]
I am hard-pressed to understand how these characteristics of “interfiction” distinguish it from other, non-genre, “experimental” fiction that also “does interesting things with narrative and style” and “takes artistic chances.” Experimental fiction (which ultimately I would have to say is a part of “literary fiction,” representing its vanguard in exploring the edges of the literary) precisely “demands that you read it on its own terms” rather than according to pre-established conventions. If interfictions are just versions of experimental fiction, why coin this additional term to describe them? If there is some significant difference between interstitial and experimental fiction, something that has to do with genre, why not be more specific and delineate exactly what that is rather than fall back on the usual language about taking artistic chances, etc.?
[…]
Most of the rest are forgettable exercises conducted on what seem (to me) familiar science fiction/fantasy terrain. Some of them, such as Anna Tambour’s “The Shoe in SHOES’ Window” and Catherynne M. Valente’s “A Dirge for Prester John” are essentially unreadable, full of pretentious declamations substituting for narrative: “Truly, where chaos reigns, even at night, nonsense and evasion shine where people look for straightforwardness, but where they look for inspiration, something beyond the realm of daily existence, they are then shown only things, and who can feed his soul with that?” Too many of the stories, in fact, are like this, straining after Meaning where some “merely literary” formal and stylistic pleasures would go a long way toward deflating the pomposity.

EDIT: Oh, I can’t leave this post looking so straight-faced. The truth, though it’s both mean and childish of me, is that I find this review hilarious. Not because I think Dan’s being wrongheaded — I mean, I often do think Dan’s being wrongheaded, but I enjoy his posts and respect his thinking for all that, and in this case I haven’t read enough of the book to say whether I agree or disagree with his overall assessment of the anthology’s quality. (I’ve read about a third of the stories, and though none of them have blown me away, none of them have seemed a waste of space, either.) No, what I find entertaining is that the book has so comprehensively failed to explain itself, its argument and goals, to someone coming to it from outside genre circles. It’s all very well for those of us coming to it from the inside to instantly recognise that it’s of a piece with several other recent collections — Conjunctions 39, Feeling Very Strange, the Polyphony series, ParaSpheres, etc — but what Dan’s skewering makes so painfully clear is that that’s all it is: nice for us. Admittedly, most of the books I just listed had no other audience in mind, but a couple of them did, and Interfictions, it seems to me, had that audience in mind more than any of them. And it’s just left that audience baffled by the fuss, and I find that funny. (I may have been hanging out in these parts too long.)

A question from the Millions:

How do readers evaluate a genre-straddling book by the standards of one genre without using the other as an alibi?

It’s posed as a response to The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, where the adherence to conventions of detective fiction is said to “obscure the promise of a brilliant premise”. I haven’t yet read the novel, so I don’t know to what extent this is a fair characterisation, but I do know it’s not the way I would approach evaluating a genre-straddling novel.

I’m using “genre-straddling” to describe those books that obviously sit in multiple camps, such as the Chabon (alternative history + detective fiction + “lit fic”, the latter defined as ‘a label no more a guarantor (or compromiser) of literary value than is “Western,” or “Sci Fi.”‘), or The Time-Traveler’s Wife (romance + sf), or Nova Swing (noir + sf), or Never Let Me Go (lit fic + sf). I’m not thinking of books that occupy blurrier territor, borrowing more fluidly from different areas of the literary gene pool.

I know what is meant by using a genre as an alibi, I think. It’s the sort of conversation that happens when a book like Never Let Me Go gets shortlisted for a science fiction award. On the one hand, I can see a valid argument against Never Let Me Go because it doesn’t work as science fiction: it is not extrapolative, the world it builds is not internally coherent. On the other hand, I can see a valid argument defending Never Let Me Go on the grounds that that’s not what the book is trying to do; but a rejoinder could be that that’s using a lit-fic assessment as an alibi for sf failings, that if that’s not what the book is trying to do then sf was the wrong tool for the job. In contrast, you can look at The Time-Traveler’s Wife and say that the romance works, and that the sf works, and that the combination of them works — the story is a romance that is made possible by the sf.

My problem, I think, is that such assessments don’t tell me much about the overall merits of the two books. The genre elements in The Time-Traveler’s Wife may be well-used, but they’re in service to a flabby book that doesn’t always feel in control of the effects it’s generating. The sf in Never Let Me Go may be terrible, but the book is also an extraordinarily nuanced portrait of repression and denial. This is not to say we shouldn’t be talking about labels: labels are useful, they provide places to stand, angles of attack, ways in. But one way in is not necessarily more valid than any other.

And yet, at the same time, the sort of synthesis you get when different genre elements play off each other and work in both directions can be immensely satisfying. To return to Chabon, I’d be interested to know from those who’ve read it if the potential of the premise is in fact obscured, or whether maybe the forn in which the story is told (pulpy plotting tricks) is at fault rather than the generic conent. Because it seems to me that in principle “detective story + alternate history” is an interesting combination: it means both the reader and the protagonist are engaged in solving mysteries as they move through the book.

• I didn’t get a chance to link it before I went, but this was the programme of Saturday’s BSFA/SFF AGM event. You can also download the agenda and the minutes of last year’s meeting from here [word doc].
• These are not official minutes, they’re just some notes I jotted down.
• We have a temporary volunteer, but Vector still needs a permanent production editor, so please do get in touch if you’re interested.
• There are a couple of other opportunities to get involved with the BSFA at the moment: we need an Awards Administrator and a Website Manager. These positions involve pretty much what you’d expect. Again, email if interested.
• On the subject of the website, apparently 17% of membership renewals are now by PayPal. The feeling of the AGM was that (a) this is a good thing and (b) this is quite a high percentage. I’m in full agreement on (a), but I’m actually a bit surprsied it’s such a low percentage.
• The BSFA had less expenses in 2006 than in 2005 (no major event), but it was overall a difficult year, from the mailing house we used to use to post the magazines going bust (with £350 we don’t seem to be able to reclaim) to Royal Mail losing a large chunk of one of the mailings at the end of the year (pursuit of compensation for that is still ongoing).
• Planning is underway for events to mark the BSFA’s 50th anniversary in 2008, but further suggestions for things we could do are welcome.
• I was on a panel about alternate history in the afternoon, along with Jon Courtenay Grimwood and last-minute conscript Francis Spufford (who seems to not have a website, although there’s a bio here), which riffed off the Adam Mars-Jones review of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I think it would have gone better if I’d done my brainstorming more than 24 hours in advance, and had time to assimilate all the points for discussion I’d come up with, so that I could feed them out in a measured fashion rather than galloping through them all in half an hour. But my co-panellists said lots of smart things, and several people said they enjoyed it, so it must have gone ok.
• Went for a wander around central Sheffield after the AGM, and parts of it have been really quite nicely regenerated. Whoever planned the redevelopments likes their fountains, though. Some photos.