To start the week, here are some articles from the most recent Vector. “Storying Lives” was the loose theme; Gary K. Wolfe’s essay, “Framing the Unframeable“, takes a broad look of that theme in the context of sf:

When one looks at the published memoirs and autobiographical sketches written by science fiction and fantasy authors, mostly for the benefit of their fans – the sort of thing collected in Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison’s Hell’s Cartographers (1975) or Martin Greenberg’s Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science Fiction Writers (1981) – one is initially struck by the relative thinness and lack of genuine introspection of many of the essays. Typically, such pieces read as a variety of Augustinian conversion tales, depicting a precocious childhood, often solitary and bookish, sometimes sickly, sometimes featuring battles with parents to get into the adult sections of the library, and characteristically leading toward a moment of revelation: “And then came Hugo Gernsback” (Alfred Bester) [1] “Then I saw and bought an issue of something called Amazing Stories” (Damon Knight) [2] “So science fiction entered into and began warping my life from an early age” (Brian Aldiss) [3] etc. In one of the still-comparatively rare autobiographies of SF writers, Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction, Jack Williamson ends a chapter with the following cliffhanger:

Something else happened, however, in the spring of 1926, the first year I was out of high school. Something that changed my life. Hugo Gernsback launched a new pulp magazine, filled with reprinted stories by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and A. Merritt and Edgar Rice Burroughs, stories he called “scientifiction.”

The magazine was Amazing Stories. [4]

Following these road-to-Damascus moments, however, these memoirs and autobiographies seldom become genuine testaments, instead amounting to not much more than narrative resumés, filled with anecdotes of encounters with fellow writers and editors and often with almost obsessively detailed accounts of sales figures and payments; one comes away with the sense that (a) science fiction writers all clearly remember the first SF story they read, and (b) they keep really good tax records.

While Graham Sleight considers storying some genres:

I have to say, in general, that debates about the definition of sf (or fantasy, or horror) don’t exercise me very much – though of course that may reflect a lack of rigour on my part. I am quite taken by Samuel Delany’s view that we should not try to define genres – because, for instance, definition inevitably means concentrating on boundary cases at the expense of the core of the genre, because it sets up a target which critics and writers can game, and so on. But there are plenty of people who do try to define sf in radically differing ways, and I thought it might be useful to try and sort some of those ways out.

And in “Founded on the Shambles“, Paul Kincaid discusses Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”:

‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ breaks every rule. There are no named characters, indeed no real characters at all. There is no story, at least in the sense that we follow characters through a series of incidents and events towards a climax. There are only two lines of dialogue, unconnected to each other, in the entire piece. There isn’t even much in the way of authorial certainty: ‘I do not know the rules and laws of their society’ (274) she confesses at one point, and at another, having listed some of their technologies, she retreats: ‘Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it’ (275). And the very subject of the story, that which gives it its title, appears only in the very last paragraph.

We don’t read ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ because of these storytelling quirks, but because these storytelling quirks throw the theme of the story so much into focus.

Meanwhile, in reviews, Lesley A. Hall tackles Julie Phillips’ Tiptree biography:

Biography is a form in which perfection always lies beyond the possibility of achievement. However, Julie Phillips’ biography of Alice Bradley Sheldon, the complex and troubled woman best known to science fiction readers as James Tiptree Jr (with a subsidiary fictive literary identity as Racoona Sheldon, reclusive former schoolteacher), is about as good as it gets.

Gary Dalkin considers Rainbows End:

Central to all this is enigmatic cyber entity ‘Rabbit’, who may be one of the established characters in the novel, an AI, or, well… and herein lies the major flaw of Rainbows End. Much is made of not knowing who might be behind what persona on-line, so that as with the on-line world today Vinge’s protagonists may ultimately never know what is really going on. Which might be realistic, but leaves a plot riddled with absurdly improbable coincidences for want of the twist, the revelation, the narrative U-turn, which would tie the disparate yet interconnected narrative threads together in a convincing way. The result is a sprawling, highly imaginative novel in which all the many elements fail to resolve into a satisfying whole.

And L.J. Hurst discusses Desperate Moon:

Heidel’s two admitted influences are Ellison and Ray Bradbury, and they stand out, because if you like Bradbury you’ll like the mixture to be found here. On the other hand you will not find much advance on what Ray Bradbury was doing in mixing fantasies and horror stories in his collections in the 1950s. You will also find some stories remind you of other works within sf (‘The Thing-In-The-Back-Yard’ is reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘The Father-Thing’, for example) and outside of it (‘Dead Drunk’, in which a character meets Death, echoes Woody Allen’s sketch ‘Getting Even’).

While I’m at it, I should note that the Matrix website has also been updated. New content there includes Lon S. Cohen on fan-made films, Richard Matthews on an adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition, and Martin McGrath on season two of Battlestar Galactica:

BSG does two very rare things. First, it recognises that while politics is messy, annoying and full of political differences that may be forever intractable, the democratic political process remains crucial to any kind of good society. And, second, it asks the viewer to do a very difficult thing – to like and respect those with whom you fundamentally disagree. BSG contains characters and plot elements that can resonate with or infuriate those on both the left and the right, yet it almost never collapses into a cosy centralism that imagines that everything would be better if people could forget their principles and “just get along”.

Here’s an interview with M. John Harrison by Iain Emsley. Of interest, given China Mieville’s recent comments about the New Weird and British Boom in Locus:

There’s been a lot spoken about post-Seattle fiction, especially by China. Do you see this as in fact happening or is it part of a cycle in literature?

Category-making is an exercise of control. When anything out of the ordinary happens in a genre, an entire immune system of activists–reviewers, bloggers, academics, pseudo-academics, anthologisers, editors, marketeers, piggybackers and other opportunists–rushes to manage, exploit and contain the outbreak by defining it in established categorical and historical terms. Where it centres on the appearance of a young writer, it’s less a discourse than the kind of grooming done by paedophiles. One of its effects is to absorb the other safely into the self and keep the genre’s economics churning. The New Weird started as a joke but rapidly became a way of making an intervention in that process, baiting the immune system a little, bringing it into public view. For me it meant one thing (to name is to claim, and if I have to be claimed then it will be by myself), for China it meant another: but we shared enough goals to have fun. We’ve moved on now, and for us the joke’s over.

I believe that Tachyon are planning a New Weird anthology for next year. Gotta admire the timing.

(Also, it seems pleasingly apt that the Wikipedia page for New Weird has a note at the top saying “The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed” …)

EDIT: Since WordPress apparently hates Martin today, I get to point out the links he recovered from archive.org: one, two, three. A prize to anyone who can locate thread four.

For reasons that I haven’t quite been able to divine, yesterday this blog got more page views than ever before, by a nontrivial margin (more than the previous two days put together, for instance). Which is a nice thing to see when I look at the stats page, but makes me feel a bit guilty that the content has lately been, and is likely to remain for the next six weeks, a bit anemic. The situation is this: I owe reviews to NYRSF, Foundation and Strange Horizons, I’m in the middle of finalising the content for Vector 250, and I still have an ominously large pile of books to get through before the Clarke shortlist. So while I have some posts I plan to make (I suspect I’ll have something to say about the adaptation of “The Screwfly Solution”, for instance, and there will be stories-of-the-year and books-of-the-year posts) it might also go a bit quiet.

In the meantime, I can at least point you at my review of Blindsight by Peter Watts.

If you have a particularly good memory for trivia, you may recall that I struggled a bit with this review, and re-reading it now there are some parts I’m still not entirely happy with. (It also occurs to me that the information in the second-to-last paragraph might be considered a spoiler, except that for whatever reason it was something I twigged to fairly early on in the book.) But the central point — I hope — comes across, which is that Blindsight is a remarkable novel, powerful both in concept and execution. And you should read it.

In lieu of actual textual content, and inspired by The Sorted Books Project:

Anyone for some audience participation? It’s trickier than it looks.

Vector 249 is officially Out In The Wild, so here’s the table of contents. It is, I feel comfortable saying, a good ‘un.

Torque Control — editorial
Framing the Unframeable — Gary K. Wolfe on storying lives in sf and fantasy
Writing Without a Filter — Elizabeth Hand interviewed by Graham Sleight
Journey into Space — A trip down memory lane by Steve Cockayne
The Modern Storytellers — Jon Ingold on Interactive Fiction
Good Cop/Bad Cop — Alison Page on Life on Mars
Archipelago: Founded on the Shambles — Paul Kincaid on Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
First Impressions — Book reviews edited by Paul N. Billinger
Particles — Books received by Paul N. Billinger
The New X: Storying Genres — a column by Graham Sleight

A few announcements.

First, as noted in the editorial, and here a little while ago, this is Geneva’s last issue as co-editor. The last five issues of Vector — and especially the international issue — wouldn’t have been what they’ve been without Geneva, so this is a public thank you: thank you. (I’ll be staying on solo for the forseeable future because I’m a sucker.)

Secondly, it’s not Tony Cullen’s last issue as production editor, but he’ll be stepping down soon because he’s already stepped up to take over as Chair of the BSFA. And I have no doubt he’ll do a fine job, but it does mean I’ll be needing someone to do layout work on Vector. Please drop me a line if you might be interested.

Thirdly, as Peter expands on here, we’d like to make sure that all BSFA members receive their mailing this time around. So, if you’ve received yours — or, if by the start of next week you haven’t received it — please email Peter Wilkinson, the membership secretary, to let him know.

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do ever since the Vector website went up is to start reprinting content from the 45+ years of back issues. In fact, I had my eye on one essay in particular, from Vector 229, which is now online:

Freedom in an Owned World: Warhammer fiction and the Interzone Generation
By Stephen Baxter

‘”Curse all manling coach drivers and all manling women,” muttered Gotrek Gurnisson, adding a curse in Dwarvish …’

That’s the first line of ‘Geheimnisnacht’ by William King, the first story in the first book of Warhammer fiction, the anthology Ignorant Armies, published in 1989. Since that beginning there has been published a whole string of books, magazines and comics, set in the universes of the highly successful war games and role-playing games marketed by Games Workshop (GW).

Partly because of the involvement of Interzone editor David Pringle, who was editor of the GW line from 1988 to 1991, over the years several prominent British writers of sf and fantasy have contributed to the various series, many from what used to be known as the ‘Interzone generation’. My own involvement was modest, two short stories published in 1989 and 1990; there have been much more significant contributions from David Garnett, Kim Newman, Brian Stableford, Ian Watson and others. Today GW publishes new and reprinted fiction — great mountains of it, in fact — under its ‘Black Library’ imprint. But over the years GW fiction itself has been the subject of a saga of gamers and business suits, of orthodoxies and heresies, of Stakhanovites and rebels, of collapses and recoveries, of intriguing lost possibilities, and of struggles for literary freedom in an ‘owned universe’.

Go read it. It’s very long — over 10,000 words — but it is, I think, my favourite of the articles that have been published in Vector in the time I’ve been reading it. Oddly enough, what prompted me to get around to putting it online was Abigail’s excellent post on Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners”, in which she quite rightly talks about how central the depiction of fannish behaviour is to understanding the story:

… there’s nothing that’s not familiar about the all-consuming devotion with which Jeremy and his friends incorporate The Library into their everyday lives. They watch — and re-watch — the episodes together, as a communal experience, discuss and analyze the events of each episode, and dress up as their favorite characters. I don’t imagine there are many people reading this post who can’t sympathize, or offer an example of similar behavior. For me, it was The X-Files, but I imagine there are people my age who might offer up Babylon 5 as their first fannish love, and folks a bit older who first geeked out over Star Trek: The Next Generation. Whatever television show it was that once captured your heart to the extent that it became part of your life, “Magic for Beginners” will read, in some ways, like excerpts from your own adolescence.

I have previously said that Angel fandom, and specifically the corner of it found in uk.media.tv.angel, was my first fandom. That’s not quite accurate; what it was, was my first fandom that endured, the first fandom in which I formed friendships that are still going strong. That didn’t happen for me with The X-Files, or Babylon 5, or any other earlier TV show — it’s hard to be genuinely fannish about something when you don’t have the internet, and don’t know anyone else who watches it in the way you do. But before all of them, my first actual fandom was Games Workshop and their tabletop fantasy wargames.

So for me, reading Baxter’s essay is not-unlike a trip down memory lane. Except it’s a slightly odd trip, because my involvement with GW coincides quite neatly with the period in which they weren’t putting out fiction. I got into the hobby — or, if you prefer, the cult — sometime in 1993, and got out of it, finally, in 1999. Baxter’s essay spends most time on the period between 1987, when GW fiction was started, and 1995, when Ian Watson’s Chaos Child was the last GW title to be published. By that time I was deep into the hobby, and I remember that, and it was an event, Speaking of the later reissuing of his books, Watson says they added “fictional prefaces denouncing the books, my suggestion, as tissues of heresy and lies, the ideal solution …” but I remember Chaos Child being presented as heretical even at the time of publication. GW stores didn’t stock it; the staff (GW stores having a deliberate “hobby” ethos, the staff and regular customers often got to know each other quite well) would tell teasing tales of how brilliant the first two volumes in the trilogy, now unavailable, were; there were excited rumours that a copy had been sighted in the WH Smith’s round the corner; and so on. I did eventually get my hands on copies of all three of Watson’s books — I think I still have them — and I remember them as being exactly the sort of dark and twisted thing I wanted from 40K fiction.

And then, a couple of years later, I was there for the launch of the short fiction magazine Inferno!, and the subsequent launch of the full Black Library imprint. By that point, or about that time, I was actually working for the Evil Empire myself. I was incredibly picky about getting a part-time job as a teenager — having set my heart on working for GW, nothing else would do — and for some reason my parents let me get away with it. To be fair, it may have been pragmatism on their part, since if I hadn’t been working there and enjoying the staff discount (miniatures at lead weight!) I suspect they’d have gone bankrupt trying to feed my habit. But I got the job, and it was quite an experience — on the one hand, a lot of fun, on the other, a steep learning curve about exactly how corporate GW really was, and how much the hobbyism was a veneer.

Of course, it was still incredibly addictive. I had armies, plural, for all the major games (If you’re wondering, Wood Elves, Chaos Dwarves and Dwarves — now all overpowered runic weapons to the end! — in Warhammer, and Dark Angels, Tyranids and Eldar — now all ludicrously powerful everything to the end! — in 40K; I’m not going to list everything, at least not unless prompted in the comments); was there every games night, Thursdays ’till 8, even when I wasn’t working; spent god knows how many hours painting the miniatures; and went to the exercise in controlled mass hysteria that was Games Day every autumn. Did I care that the universes in which the games were set were thinly-disguised ripoffs of, well, everything else? No, not a bit — although in my defence, I was never as far gone as this guy. Games Workshop is even responsible for my first and only foray into fanfic — if memory serves, I wrote about a young girl from a farm planet who stowed away on a ship to Earth but got captured by an Arbitrator.

What got me out of it, in the end, was going to university. I tried to carry on the job part-time, but quickly realised that wasn’t going to work; I went along to the local gaming club for a while, but never really got to know the people there as well as I’d known the regulars at my home store, not least because I had so much less time to devote to the hobby. I think there was probably a short period during which my GW addiction was tailing off, and my Angel fandom was just starting up, but I don’t think I could say for sure. And while it is my Angel fandom experiences that resonate most strongly when I read “Magic for Beginners”, there are certainly elements of the story — the camaraderie, the anticipation of new releases — that carry back into GW fandom as well.

As for Baxter’s essay, well, having now got into general sf fandom in the way that I have, reading an essay that explains that some of the prehistory of my first fandom is intertwined with what I think of as the modern start of my current fandom (British Boom and all that; I suspect I found Baxter’s Raft at around the same time that I was reading Ian Watson’s Inquisitor novels) inevitably also has enormous resonance. But I think the essay is well worth reading even if you don’t have my personal experience. The list of recognisable names who wrote for GW can be quite startling if you’re not expecting it — Charles Stross, Kim Newman, Nicola Griffith, and Brian Stableford, for starters, with David Pringle editing the initial list — and Baxter does an excellent and entertaining job of filling in the context, as well as investigating the conflicting issues that surround writing franchise fiction. Which, let’s face it, haven’t gone away.

Another thing that hasn’t quite gone away is my desire to play the games. Like a junkie jonesing for a hit, I still sometimes get the urge to break out my armies from their foam-packed stasis and head down to the local store, though I suspect the rules have changed (yet again) since my day, and really (much like World of Warcraft) I know that if I let it gain a foothold, it would swallow my life whole. And then, in the back of my mind, as a compromise measure, I get this crazy notion of contacting the Black Library to ask for some review copies …

From China Mieville’s interview in the November Locus:

“As I go on, I have an increasing sense of the speed at which history moves. Whether you thought all the discussion of New Weird and blah blah blah was ridiculous or useful, one of the reasons I stopped talking about it was that history had moved on. Whatever the movement was, it was in my opinion related to the cultural efflorescence that happened after the protests in Seattle in ’99, when there was an enormous sense of potentiality in the field (and elsewhere) — which to me was about expressing a sense of potentiality in the social and psychic life. The much-vaunted British Boom was from 2001 to 2003, and basically now I suspect it’s on a dying fall. When the mainstream notices something, it’s dead.”

Greg Egan is writing a new novel, and his website has the tiniest of extracts:

“Almost everything about this world remains to be discovered,” Lahl said. “Until someone is willing to pursue the matter vigorously, the few scraps of information I’m carrying will mean very little.”

Rakesh was beginning to feel as if he was being prodded awake from a stupefying dream that had gone on so long he’d stopped believing it could ever end. He’d come to this node, this cross-roads, in the hope of encountering exactly this kind of traveller, but in ninety-six years he’d learnt nothing from the people passing through that he could not have heard on his home world. He’d made friends among the other node-dawdlers, and they passed the time together pleasantly enough, but his old, naive fantasy of colliding with a stranger bearing a surfeit of mysteries — a weary explorer announcing, “I’ve seen enough for one lifetime, but here, take this crumb from my pocket” — had been buried long ago.

Incandescence is “likely to be published in early 2008”, the page says. Hooray! [via]

I just received an email informing me (and a lot of other people) that Jack Williamson has died. I don’t know if the message from Betty Williamson in the email is for general forwarding, so I won’t put the full text up here, but apparently he was in his study, surrounded by people who loved him. There will be a memorial service, possibly next week.

Jack Williamson sold his first story in 1928, at the age of 20. He was the last living writer who had been writing science fiction since before science fiction existed as a genre. Here‘s an essay by John Clute:

The personal miracle of Jack Williamson’s career is that he wrote himself out of the belatedness that governed the genre when he began; and that for several decades after 1940 his creative mind paced the train. He rode a long ways up the line, which is a very high score for a man. Until he got to here. Where he finds readers half his age — readers a quarter his age — who long to reinhabit the very worlds he climbed out of, the vacuum tubes of Eden, a place to park our bindlestiffs around the campfire, and not miss the train at all.

EDIT: And here’s John Clute’s full obituary, in The Independent.

A brief word of explanation for those of you who (inexplicably) may not have given much thought to the history of the BSFA: Vector has been around for a while. Way back in the 1960s, when issue numbers were only two digits and the magazine was being edited by Rog Peyton, a series of fanzine review and fannish commentary columns started to appear under the title “Behind The Scenes”, as by Malcolm Edwards. This was a pseudonym for Pete Weston (whose With Stars in my Eyes was a Best Related Book Hugo nominee last year), and caused some confusion when a real Malcolm Edwards entered fandom a few years later.

Greg Pickersgill has now put the columns online, with his own covering note:

It was forty years ago —

My copy of the British SF Association’s magazine, VECTOR, issue 43, dated March 1967, was a really big thing for me. I’d been aware of sf fandom for while, my curiosity and interest aroused and increased by various mentions in the back-issue magazines I enthusiastically collected, and in Kingsley Amis’ NEW MAPS OF HELL and Damon Knight’s IN SEARCH OF WONDER, books I read and re-read with endless fascination. Then there was the column ‘Our Man In Fandom’, by Lin Carter, which appeared in the then-current British reprints of WORLDS OF IF, and then, incredibly, in one of the last of the hard-to-get Compact issues of NEW WORLDS, a small-ad for the BSFA itself. Dazzlement! Enchantment! I joined instantly.

Even the rather rudimentary nature — poorly duplicated, folded foolscap paper — of the magazine that eventually arrived (after a worrying delay, the BSFA being in one its occasional disorganised phases) was no deterrent to my growing enthusiasm. Unlike so many sf readers who seem to be unaccountably frightened by the unfamiliar I was deeply attracted to the new world of sf fandom with its sometimes unusual terminology, and even the sense that everyone knew everyone except me was no real barrier. Of course as the only sf reader in school — as I was at that time — I was used to being the outsider, no question.

I read that issue of VECTOR so many times I’m surprised the pages didn’t drop to shreds from the endless eyetracks; all of it was new and absorbing, but the prime delight was the BEHIND THE SCENES column by one Malcolm Edwards. This character wrote fluently and knowledgeably about fandom, fans and fanzines and sounded like the right sort of person, absolutely. If only I knew someone like that, I thought. But there were no fans within at least a hundred miles of where I lived at the time, so maybe I’d better get a burst on and get into this fanzine thing, learn the language, find out who’s who about town. And I did. Not without incident, including a letter to the BSFA complaining about how all those Big Name Fans just wouldn’t get off their high horses once in a while to help the poor struggling neophyte. Well, I was sixteen, and much more stupid then.

Fandom before the internet, eh?