A couple of weeks ago, Abigail Nussbaum reviewed Theodora Goss’s debut collection, In The Forest of Forgetting, for Strange Horizons. I’d also just read the collection (and written a review, for Vector, which won’t appear until 2007), and we ended up having a discussion about our differing reactions to the book. Abigail’s now posted the conversation over at Asking The Wrong Questions. As she says, it’ll make more sense if you read her review first. And I’ve just realised that there is a bit about why I like one of Goss’s stories, “The Rose in Twelve Petals”, in my review of Feeling Very Strange:

What about “The Rose in Twelve Petals” (2002) by Theodora Goss? That’s a retelling of a fairy story—Sleeping Beauty, to be precise—and surely fairy stories, even twice-told ones, have to be considered traditional?

Here comes the Prince on a bulldozer. What did you expect? Things change in a hundred years. (p. 239)

Guess again. Goss’s tale is astonishing; it would be worth slogging and hacking through the overgrown bramble of every other reimagined fairytale out there to get to, but here it is served up on a plate. As the rose has twelve petals, the story has twelve parts, and though they start traditionally enough—a witch, a king, a queen, a princess—that doesn’t last. While the Beauty sleeps, time really passes. Things change. The transition to now is vertiginous, almost harrowing: we are forced to watch the old world thinning, and our modern world coming into being. These days we have to find our own ending, Goss is telling is; may we all be lucky enough to escape from our own pockets of time.

If you were wondering, I had a few reservations about the collection as a whole, but I think it’s very much worth reading.

Also, I can neither confirm nor deny that I fight crime.

Here’s a thought: there’s no such thing as the new space opera. — Jonathan Strahan

Of all sf’s subgenres, “space opera” seems to attract the most definitional fervour. Everyone seems to have an intuitive sense of what the term means, and no two people seem to have the same intuitive sense — as demonstrated in the comment thread on Jonathan’s post, where Ellen Datlow says

I find the current use of the term “space opera” exceedingly annoying and confusing.

To me “space opera” was and always will be simple adventures in space.

David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, of course, have argued, in an essay and in their recent mammoth anthology, that most of the confusion comes from the fact that the meaning of the term has shifted.

Space opera used to be a pejorative locution designating not a subgenre or mode at all, but the worst form of formulaic hackwork: really bad SF.

[…]

Many readers and writers and nearly all media fans who entered sf after 1975 have never understood the origin of space opera as a pejorative and some may be surprised to learn of it. Thus the term space opera reentered the serious discourse on contemporary SF in the 1980s with a completely altered meaning: henceforth, space opera meant, and still generally means, colorful, dramatic, large scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focussed on a sympathetic, heroic central character, and plot action [this bit is what separates it from other literary postmodernisms] and usually set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone.

Not everyone accepts this historical account (notably Brian Stableford in his NYRSF review of The Space Opera Renaissance), but the idea of a “new space opera”, which probably started either with Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas (1987) or with Colin Greenland’s Take Back Plenty (1991) (and with M. John Harrison’s The Centauri Device [1975] as an ancestral text), has gained enough currency for there to have been an issue of Locus that focused on the topic a couple of years ago. But among other things, this version of NSO seems to get conflated with the so-called “British Boom”.

In a second post, Jonathan asks for other peoples’ definitions of space opera. My own previous attempt at wrangling with some space operas, from a couple of years ago, can be found here, but it sort of sidesteps the question of definition. I like the definition that Jonathan quotes in the comments — “lovesongs to the way the future was” — since an awful lot of modern space opera does seem to have that sense that we can’t get there from here. But he also lists “[Alastair] Reynolds, [Iain M.] Banks and [Stephen] Baxter” as definite space-opera writers, and while I think the first two are probably fair associations (granting that both have also written non space-opera work), I’m not so sure about the third.

In fact, Exultant is the only Stephen Baxter novel I’d really call space opera. The majority of his output is something else. An awful lot of his books certainly take place in space — Timelike Infinity or Titan, for instance — or have a vast cosmological scope — The Time Ships, Time, Space. But he’s also written a lot of less expansive books, from Voyage and Coalescent to this year’s Emperor.

I think you could make a case for Ring as a space opera, but I don’t think I’d be convinced by it myself, and thinking about why leads me in the direction of a definition of space opera I’m more comfortable with. Ring deals with a group of last humans touring the far-future ruins of the galaxy. It probably qualifies, just about, as “epic space adventure”, although that implies a rather more upbeat tone than I remember the novel having.

But I wouldn’t call it space opera because of how the setting is handled. One of the thumbnail definitions of hard sf that’s sometimes used is that in a hard sf story, the universe is a character. Ring fits this definition: the nominal “bad guys” in the story are the enigmatic and extraordinarily powerful Xeelee, but they never come on-screen, and there’s every indication that they pay as much attention to humans as humans pay to ants. In fact, what the characters in Ring are struggling against is the cold infinity of the universe. You could say that there is a space opera story going on — the Xeelee have their own enemies, the photino birds — but we’re not a part of it.

Exultant, though set in the same sequence, is much more a space opera, to my mind. For starters, it has space battles. Lots of space battles. Space battles that have been going on for thousands of years on fronts hundreds of light-years across. There’s lots of gosh-wow physics, and some nods to how big and unfeeling the universe is, but the universe isn’t a character in Exultant: it’s a stage set. At heart Exultant is a human drama, in exactly the way that Ring isn’t. So space opera, we could say, cuts the universe down to size.

None of which, of course, tackles Jonathan’s original suggestion, that there’s no such thing as the new space opera. I’m not sure I buy that; at the very least I think that the post-Banks or post-Greenland British space opera is new, if only because, Harrison, Dan Dare, and Journey Into Space aside, I have real trouble thinking of British space opera written before about 1980. Suggestions are, of course, welcomed.

I posted most of this as a comment already, but it was rushed, so I want to do a better job of it here. Lydia Millet reviews Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock. It’s a favourable review, but Millet also says:

And yet—and yet—given that what Munro does, she does with immaculate precision—why always, with such a richness of skill, this insistent choice on the purely personal, the proximate world of the self and its near relations? In the cosmology of this world, the personal, social world, the individual is seen delicately negotiating a balance with friends and family: Her journey is the steady sun around which all planets revolve.

Surely the vast universe beyond the minutely personal is also of some little interest. There is, of course, often a backdrop. Munro, for instance, loves the land, loves her region within it, and comes to the land in her prose with knowledge, deliberation and devotion. Still, the land is a setting primarily for a specific subset of us, for the foibles and discoveries and preoccupations of the social self. And in the broader, dominant literary culture of realistic and personal fictions, a culture where Munro tends to lead and others to follow, the land often drops away entirely in favour of a massive foreground of people with problems.

Dan Green takes exception:

I’m glad [Munro] writes about “the proximate world of the self and its near relations,” because this is what presumably provokes her to write in the first place. Perhaps one day I will read a Munro story “about the foibles and discoveries and preoccupations of the social self” that rises to the level of great art, that shows me how this subject can be the catalyst for creating fiction of sufficient “beauty” and aesthetic depth that its putative subject becomes irrelevant—indeed, a story in which only that subject could have inspired the author to plumb such depths. I haven’t read that story yet, but I’m pretty sure that if I do come to see the merit in Alice Munro’s fiction it won’t be because I’ve stumbled upon a story about “corrupt churches and governments.”

I assume that Lydia Millett takes herself to be a writer capable of conveying “meaning,” of discerning “right and wrong,” of analyzing “our philosophies or propensity for atrocities,” but I’m not sure where she’s acquired this wisdom and these talents, and in general I’m not going to turn to novels for insight into these issues. (That Millett’s own most recent novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart could be described as about “nuclear disarmament” was enough to make me stay away from it.) I also assume that Alice Munro has never considered herself qualified to pronounce on such subjects, and that she considers it the fiction writer’s job to stick to the mundane realities of individual lives (“people with problems”). This approach in itself does not guarantee the result will be aesthetically accomplished work (although it may gain a certain amount of admiration for the subtleties of “craft” involved), but it stands a better chance of keeping the aesthetic in sight as a desirable goal than the attempt to grapple with war and famine, or the “environment” as an abstract concept.

To which my immediate question, of course, is: why?

Clearly, assuming that Munro is writing about what provokes her to write in the first place (I hope it’s unlikely that she’s writing about particular subjects because she feels those are “the writer’s job”), then continuing to write about those subjects is more likely to enable her to produce great art than falsely raising her gaze and trying to address other subjects. And while I’m slightly confused by Green’s definition of great art, I agree with the version he eventually seems to settle on, more or less. The idea of “fiction of sufficient “beauty” and aesthetic depth that its putative subject becomes irrelevant” seems to be immediately contradicted by the idea that great art would be “a story in which only that subject could have inspired the author to plumb such depths”. I’m not touching the former statement with a bargepole, but the latter seems a fair working definition of greatness to me—although surely the subject in such cases isn’t irrelevant, it’s essential, in that if the subject were anything else the story wouldn’t work.

But I would cheerfully say that Primo Levi’s “Carbon” meets this definition, despite the fact that it’s a story that’s utterly removed from the personal. Which is another way of saying that, basically, I’m in sympathy with Millet: while I don’t think it’s fair to criticise Munro for doing what she does, I see no particular reason why one group of subjects (intimate, personal) should stand “a better chance of keeping the aesthetic in sight as a desirable goal” than another group of subjects (what we might call cultural or or moral or philosophical). In fact, the potential value of fiction that addresses this latter group well seems self-evident to me.

Yet Green also states that he’s not usually going to turn to novels for insights into “these issues”: again, why? Assuming that a writer is not going to be able to offer you a perspective you haven’t considered yourself strikes me as somewhat hubristic, and assuming that a writer is not going to have “acquired such insight” so as to be able to talk intelligently about cultural or philosophical issues strikes me as somewhat patronising. More to the point, I see no particular reason why a writer will be more likely to offer me insight into a personal experience than into a moral question. I don’t expect any writer to provide definitive “answers” in either case, after all; they may argue for one answer or another, but the important thing, to me, is that they raise the questions and frame them in a useful way.

Perhaps, if we’re accepting that great literature is literature that could only be facilitated by its specific subject, then it’s just a matter of perception. Maybe where I would admire a novel like, say, The King’s Last Song by Geoff Ryman because of the portrait it paints of past and present Cambodian society, Green would admire it (if he did) for the richness of the portrayal of a character like Map, and the vividness of his specific experiences. Similarly for books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. We might admire different aspects of the whole. But it strikes me that a lot of books are going to privilege one aspect over another, and I can’t help thinking that as readers we should be open to that. We should let writers take us where they please, and decide afterwards if the journey was worth it. Clearly this is shaped by my background as a science fiction reader, which stereotypically does privilege the general over the personal; but even allowing for that, I can’t shake the feeling that insisting that literature is better at addressing some subjects than others is sadly limiting.

A meme, via Abigail, Martin, and Alison. The idea is that you list the ten books on your shelves that you haven’t read. I have many, many more than ten books on my shelves that I haven’t read; I couldn’t tell you exactly which have been sitting there the longest, but these are the ones that are nagging at me at the moment:

1. Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

Four years ago I spent six months working in a bookshop. When I left, I shamelessly abused my staff discount and bought vast piles of books. I haven’t even nearly worked my way through them. This, being by all accounts the Banks sf novel to read, has been nagging at me since then.

2. The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson

I loved Cryptonomicon, so I bought these as they came out. In hardback. Next time I have a spare three months, I’ll read them. (So, mid-2008, then.)

3. Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler

I picked this up at an Eastercon at some point in the past few years. I haven’t read much by Fowler, but everything I have has filled me with joy, with the exception of The Jane Austen Book Club, and even that was pretty good. The premise of this one intrigues me:

The American Old West, Winter, 1873: a white woman of indeterminate age and great ugliness materialises in a Chinese railway workers’ camp, babbling incomprehensibly. Chin Ah Kin believes she is one of the fabled immortals, sent to enchant him. His more practical uncle sees trouble, and orders Chin to escort her back to the white world and the local lunatic asylum where she must belong. […] Neither malign nor benign, who is she and where does she come from?

4. Dubliners by James Joyce

A while ago I attempted Ulysses and bounced fairly hard; being me, I turn to Joyce’s short stories for my next attempt on his oeuvre. Except that this was given to me as a birthday present last year, and I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

5. Temeraire by Naomi Novik

The major fantasy release this year that I want to read and should read but haven’t read, despite having bought a hardback on publication.

6. Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

The major sf release this year that I want to read and should read but haven’t read, despite having bought a hardback on publication.

7. Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Recommended by Abigail when we were discussing The King’s Last Song, as relevant to thinking about political art, so I should try to make time for it soon.

8. Orlando by Virgina Woolf

Having read A Room of One’s Own for the first time earlier this year and fallen thoroughly in love with Woolfe’s voice, I went and bought an omnibus edition of three of her novels quicksharp. Victoria assures me this is the one to start with.

9. Selected Stories by Theodore Sturgeon

Sturgeon is the great classic short story sf writer I want to read and haven’t (just ahead of Cordwainer Smith). I’m not brave enough to dive into the umpteen-volume “Complete Stories” series being put together by North Atlantic Books, but this looks like an easier way in, so I snapped up a copy a little while ago.

10. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

It sounds like my sort of thing, I’ve owned a copy since about March, and now it’s won the Best Novel Hugo. I have no excuse.

Other stuff:

• I’ve been in Copenhagen for most of the past week. It was a work-related trip, but I did manage to find a couple of hours to wander around the city. There are photos here. Had I been concentrating, I’d have taken Miss Smilia’s Feeling For Snow with me, or something; as it is I’ve been reading Julie Phillips’ biography of James Tiptree Jr, which (amazingly) is about as good as everyone says it is.
• For those who may care but haven’t checked, there are some interesting comments on the last two posts.
• Gabe Chouinard has a long essay on reviewing and criticism and all that jazz. It’s broken up into several chunks for discussion on his livejournal.

Following on from his article in Vector 247, Nick Wood has been continuing his search for South African SF:

But it is also clear that the language of science (fiction) does not necessarily hold sway in South Africa. This is not to say that it is a primitive place, pre-scientific in understanding and experience – these are colonial notions based on beliefs of Western civilisation as a teleological end-point for socio-cultural development. There are a multitude of discourses operating in South Africa, as befits the diverse (and sometimes fractured) nature of experiences and cultural contexts, which underpins the diversity of the country’s human resources.

EDIT: Judith Berman also has some discussion of her article “Bears, Bombs and Popcorn“, here and here.

John Sutherland argues for fiction that can teach us things in the Guardian (via), including sf:

It is unfashionable to assert it, but the novel does, I believe, still have a socio-educational value. It is not just Miss Manners. Fiction can make us better, or at least, better informed citizens. In a technological age, for example, it is important that the population should know something about the machinery that makes modern life possible and how it works. Science fiction has done as much for the factual scientific education of the average reader as all the educational reforms introduced since CP Snow’s 1959 polemic The Two Cultures lamented his fellow Britons’ epidemic ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics. The fact, revealed in a survey by the magazine Wired in November 2005, that 40 per cent of Americans believe that aliens are in the habit of routinely visiting our planet and taking away sample earthlings for full body cavity probes, suggests that sf may also have a lot to answer for in dumbing down the citizenry.

This is also a post to say that my blogging frequency is likely to be somewhat reduced this month. I’ll be around, but I have some things I need to get written, the looming prospect of two weeks that are likely to be extremely work-heavy, and I really need to knuckle down on the Clarke reading front. When I get my life back: Spin. Or Twenty Epics. Or possibly the forever-delayed post on why “Magic for Beginners” is so wonderful. Bet you can’t wait.

Paula Guran explains Fantasy Magazine‘s reviews policy:

The idea here is to review anonymously (like Publishers Weekly) while still saying exactly who the reviewers are — just not who wrote exactly what. I feel it frees the reviewer while still assuring the reader that a variety of respected opinion is being presented. (Issue #4 has two “featured” reviews with bylines, btw. )

Why? The number one reason is that this way the reviews are seen as “Fantasy” magazine reviews. The second reason is that genre is a small world and few of its knowledgeable reviewers live in ivory towers so it sometimes helps you be a better reviewer if your name is not on a review. That being said, it is only fair to the reader to know s/he can have confidence that a review is written by someone whose opinion they respect — thus the list of reputable reviewers doing the reviews.

She asks for opinions. I’m ambivalent. On the one hand, as was covered at tedious length in last week’s discussions, I’m all for honest negative reviews. Not only do I think they’re good for the health of the field, but I enjoy reading discussions of books people didn’t like just as much as I enjoy reading discussions of books they liked. So if an anonymised reviews section creates an environment that encourages that, I’m for it. On the other hand, though, I can’t see an particular reason why it should be necessary. I know a similar desire for freedom was behind the Dark Cabal (remember them?), for instance, but magazines like Interzone don’t seem to have had trouble recruiting a group of people who are prepared to say what they think under their own bylines.

And anonymity could also be frustrating. Some readers may not notice who writes a review, but I tend to; in part, admittedly, because I write reviews myself, but that’s not the only reason. Pretty much everyone who reviews for either Locus or NYRSF presumably falls into the category of ‘respected reviewer’, but I don’t agree with anyone who writes for either venue all the time, and some of them I disagree with frequently. I have no reason to expect that Fantasy Magazine‘s reviewers are any different, but because most of the reviews are quite short, and therefore don’t have the space to develop a detailed argument, there’s more of an element of taking what the review says on trust. I take Paula’s point about creating trust in a more general reviews ‘brand’, but it still looks a bit like an attempt to claim objectivity for an activity which is, by definition, subjective.

UPDATE: Further discussion here.

If you watch the Strange Horizons reviews RSS feed you may well have already seen this, but if not: the review of Idolon that I mentioned last week is now up, along with an interview with Mark Budz. (Plus the usual fiction, column and poetry.)

Meme Therapy’s latest brain parade asks “What is the job of contemporary sf? Does it have a job?” To which most of the respondents so far say no, not really, or at most no but. Which of course is the correct and proper stance: we all know nowadays that the important part of science fiction is that it’s fiction, that it is an art form, that it has no responsibility, and indeed no ability, to be anything else. We know that whatever value inheres in science fiction is aesthetic value, and that it can and should be measured by the same yardsticks as other forms of fiction.

I’m not saying this is wrong, per se, but it’s interesting to compare that sort of stance to, of all things, the latest episode of Stargate SG-1. I don’t watch Stargate. Once upon a time I would have done—in my teens I was indiscriminate, happily gobbling up whatever BBC2 decided to show in their weekday 6.45 slot—but these days it seems like too much commitment for too little return. But It’s reached two hundred episodes, which is an absurdly high number, and the prepublicity photos suggested they were going to celebrate the fact in gloriously absurd style. And they do, for forty-two minutes and thirty-one seconds of the forty-two minute and fifty-five second episode.

The conceit, by the way, builds on the show’s hundredth episode, which I haven’t seen, in which it transpires that a studio is developing a thinly-veiled (to those in the know) version of the SG-1 team’s story for tv. It’s called Wormhole X-treme!, and in the latest episode we learn that it lasted for three episodes, but that it did well on DVD so now there’s interest in making a tv movie. Cue all the meta ever—not only is Stargate itself based on a film, of course, but two of the current actors, Ben Browder and Claudia Black, were the leads on Farscape, which died and was resurrected as a tv movie—plus various suggestions for how the movie could work, and so on. The movie falls through, but the tv series gets recomissioned, and the last segment is a flash-forward ten years to a behind-the-scenes documentary focusing on the Wormhole X-treme! cast and crew. Cue even more gentle parody, as the actors’ doubles talk about the challenges they faced in such a long-running show, and the producer says that he thinks one of the secrets of their success is how they don’t take themselves too seriously; and then, in the last twenty-four seconds, we cut to an interview with the actor playing the Teal’c equivalent, who says:

“Science fiction is an existential metaphor. It allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, ‘individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today. But the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.'”

End of episode. Fade to black. It’s shameless, it’s manipulative, it’s arrogant … and yet I found myself moved by it, by the simple, whole-hearted belief that it demonstrates in the project of science fiction.

I’ve been reading Mark Budz’s latest novel, Idolon, for review for Strange Horizons. It’s set in a near future on the edge of the sort of shared sensory environment that’s cropped up in recent work by Vernor Vinge and Chris Beckett, among others. People and buildings are habitually coated with electronic skin, programmable matter that allows them to imitate the style of people and places from times past. I don’t want to gazump my own review, but one of the things that’s struck me about it, particularly having just watched that Stargate episode, is the presence of passages like this:

He felt the pressure, too. It got to him after a while. It got to everyone. Each day, reality became a little less familiar … a little more uncertain. Maybe that was why so many people cast themselves in the past. It wasn’t real, but it had been real. Which was more than anyone could say for the future.

Which surely chimes with the prevalent sentiment in that brain parade (not to mention echoing Pattern Recognition). I think it’s Graham Sleight’s review of Rainbows End that suggests the futures of science fiction can be thought of as arguments, works of advocacy. Reading the above passage, I suddenly realised that one of the reasons I was still turning the pages, probably a reason at least as strong as my interest in the characters and plot, was that I wanted to know how Idolon‘s argument resolved. More than wanting to see the bad guys beaten, I wanted to know whether the world Mark Budz was creating would rediscover its belief in the future.

Which I guess means that, on some level, I’m a believer too.

(All of which has nothing to do with international sf, for which I apologise. As recompense, I propose to write about one of the following later this week: “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter” by Geoff Ryman (Oct/Nov F&SF); “R&R” by Lucius Shepard; or the special Finncon edition of Usva. Which would you prefer, o readers?)

Now that our internationally themed issue 247 of Vector is officially loose on the world in paper form, we are free to bring a couple of selected items from it to you online.

Back in January 2006 we asked author Judith Berman to write something for Vector on the topic of cultural appropriation and the experiences she had of writing about other cultures with her novel Bear Daughter. Since then, Judith has spoken on a panel on the same subject at Wiscon, which started off a series of online discussions on matters of cultural appopriation. We’re pleased to be able to help contribute further to that discussion by bringing you Judith’s original Vector article, Bears, Bombs and Popcorn: Some considerations when mining other cultures for source material:

But I wouldn’t myself place all indigenous source materials off limits. For writers of the dominant society to avoid responding artistically to indigenous arts and literatures, even for the best of ethical reasons, for mainstream writers to designate minority writers as the only ones who are to write on freighted topics like race, colonialism, or the very existence of minority cultures (and making it the only employment they can get), merely repaints a corner of the colonial picture with the colors of guilt instead of greed and racism. Fictional Others may far too often be no more than a reflection of the writer’s stereotypes, or a pornography of the exotic, but only through contemplation of difference and the history of difference is there opportunity for genuine transformation of colonial relationships. Freedom of expression is a necessary condition for real conversation; the point isn’t to stop one person talking but to make sure others get heard.

The second feature article we’ve put online from issue 247 is Colourful Stories: Fantastic Fiction by African Descended Authors, by another author who was on the cultural appropriation panel at Wiscon, Nisi Shawl. We asked Nisi if she would write something for us, not about writing other cultures, (something she has already meditated on in print in her book Writing the Other,) but about her experiences of drawing from her own cultural background when writing fiction, as well as the cultural issues and traditions she saw reflected in the speculative fiction of a number of other authors of African origin:

Whether familial, social, and cultural concerns are addressed directly and at the work’s outset, as in the case of So Long Been Dreaming, or are intrinsic to the make-up of particular characters, as in the case of the conjure women of Mama Day, whether they provide a carefully constructed backdrop for the action as they do for Crystal Rain, or represent the conflicting forces at a story’s heart as in Stars in My Pocket… or Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the frequent presence of these concerns is of arguable importance, denoting as it does both a loss of a former social structure’s sufficiency and stability, and often, that absence’s fulfillment. Keeping in mind the idea that writers of African ancestry are more likely to reflect concerns of these sorts in their work may render visible to readers from other races depths they otherwise might miss. I hope that this essay will attract more readers to fabulist fiction by blacks, and that the possibilities inherent in the perspective I’ve sketched above, that which gives pride of place to family, society, and culture will allow them greater enjoyment of its riches.

Towards the end of her article, Nisi mentions the work of the Carl Brandon Society, which I’d like to take the opportunity to promote here too. The mission statement from their website:

The Carl Brandon Society is dedicated to addressing the representation of people of color in the fantastical genres such as science fiction, fantasy and horror. We aim to foster dialogue about issues of race, ethnicity and culture, raise awareness both inside and outside the fantastical fiction communities, promote inclusivity in publication/production, and celebrate the accomplishments of people of color in science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Last I heard, they were woefully short on British members, so come on chaps, sign up already (or donate to the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund instead if you’d rather).

As well as those two feature articles, we’ve also put up a number of reviews from First Impressions. In keeping with the international theme of the issue, two are reviews of novels in translation: Elizabeth A. Billinger’s review of Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Cold Skin and my own review of Johanna Sinisalo’s Not Before Sundown. On top of that, you can also read reviews by Niall, comparing feature writer Judith Berman’s novel Bear Daughter with Frances Hardinge’s Fly by Night, and by previous Vector editor Andrew M. Butler, discussing a bushel of John Sladek short stories.

And for those of you waiting on tenterhooks for the third instalment of Graham Sleight’s column The New X, it is also now up on the Vector website, entitled The walls are down, unfortunately.